As many of you know, we have a development project in Hamilton, Ontario – more specifically in the Corktown neighborhood. We filed our development application earlier this summer.

Because of this I was invited to participate in a Bisnow event on The Future of Hamilton. It takes place the morning of Wednesday, September 12, 2018 in The Alley by Core Urban. I walked this space last summer while it was under construction and so I’m excited to see it finished.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Core Urban, they are doing some really great work in Hamilton and have established themselves as a responsible city builder with a focus on adaptive reuse projects.

Steve Kulakowsky, who is co-owner of Core Urban, will be speaking at the event along with the mayor, some guy who has pretentiously included his middle name, and many other smart people. To see the full list of speakers and to buy a ticket, click here.

Photo of Hamilton by Vivek Trivedi on Unsplash

In December of last year, the City of Hamilton launched an RFP process to find a team (from the list of prequalified bidders) to develop a new urban community at Pier 8 along the waterfront. The ambition is somewhere around 1,500 new residential units and approximately 13,000 square meters of commercial and institutional space.

That process has narrowed the pool to 4 teams and 1 will ultimately win the exclusive right to develop the new community. Here are the teams, along with a link to their submission materials, including a short video that I understand was a requirement of the RFP.

- GulfDream (link)

- Tridel (link)

- Urban Capital / Core Urban / Milborne Group (link)

- Waterfront Shores (link)

This is a super exciting project for Hamilton. So I would encourage you to take a look at the presentation materials. At this point, you only have until Tuesday, April 17, 2018 to provide any comments to the City’s evaluators. If you’d like to view the boards in person, you can do that this Monday and Tuesday in the main lobby of City Hall.

Yesterday evening I was in Hamilton, Ontario for an adaptive reuse building tour that was put on for the 2016 OPPI Symposium (Ontario Provincial Planners Institute). 

Hamilton has lots of these sorts of projects underway. The city has a rich history and, because it never saw the development pressures that cities like Toronto saw from the 70s to 90s, many of these buildings now remain ready to be reused. That’s my theory at least.

I was told that last year downtown Hamilton delivered about 600 residential units. This may not seem like a lot, but keep in mind that the number was zero for a very long time. In fact, just seeing a crane up in the air is exciting for those who lived through that period of inactivity. I can’t fully relate to that.

But it’s not just development that is going on. It’s city building. 

The city is creating new cultural spaces and developers such as Core Urban have carved out niches working on boutique-scaled “pain in the ass” heritage projects. How’s this for commitment: Core Urban has been awarded heritage builder of the year 3 times, but they have yet to work on a designated heritage property.

I’ve said before that I think there’s a new breed of developer emerging in cities today. Hamilton is no exception. And that’s very exciting for this region.

If you’re interested in Hamilton, check out the blog Rebuild Hamilton. It’s written by Thomas Allen who I think of as Mr. Hamilton. It’s a phenomenal resource for architecture and city enthusiasts.

The photo at the top of this post was taken by me within the proposed Beasley Park Lofts by Stinson Developments.