Calgary-based, family-owned, Truman Development Corporation is creating a massive mixed-use community called West District which eventually will include an unprecedented high street of eight blocks with various retail, dining and entertainment tenants.
Tony Trutina, President of the company, said his father George started buying and assembling the land for the huge development, in the western part of Calgary, about 10 years ago. Today, it’s about 95 acres, a contiguous piece.
The project will eventually have several thousand residential units, several hundred thousand square feet of commercial, retail and office space.
“This area was just under-serviced,” said Trutina. “There wasn’t really a master-planned community at the time that this started. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, there was none that had a large contiguous land assembly like this one where you could try and do a main street, where you can plug and play certain uses, and program the street, which is not typical.
“Of this scale, I can only think of us that are doing it and that’s really it.”
The first phase of the development began in 2017.
“The vision is an urban main street where you can truly live, work, play, enjoy. You don’t have to be downtown to go to a great restaurant. All the things that you would do like destination kind of shopping which Calgary is, we’re trying to incorporate it all 10 steps from your front door. That was the idea, the concept behind it,” explained Trutina. “And that’s where the main street concept has come from.”
John Moss, Senior Vice President of real estate firm CBRE, who is handling the retail leasing of the project, said the project is creating an eight city block high street.
“So when you consider Kensington, 4th Street, 17th Avenue and Marda Loop, all of those neighbourhoods are in between four to six blocks max. Truman is being more aggressive, bringing eight city blocks that’s going to impact the whole city,” said Moss.
“This is going to be a destination for people from all over the city who are going to come. In addition to the park that they’ve curated. This is going to be a major mecca. A social media hub for the public art they’re bringing. It’s going to be city renowned.”
Trutina said a public park will be “massive”, one of the largest in the city. It will be finished in September.
Moss said one of the goals is to bring more daytime traffic to the community.
“Keeping everybody in close proximity to where they live, work and play. The food and beverage program that we’re trying to bring is we want to bring the best of class local operators like the UNA, the Blanco, the Deville coffee that we’ve already started and then start bringing other national, international players just to augment that,” said Moss.
“The food and beverage is always going to be the base. But then we want to start bringing in more fitness boutique, more retail, personal service. Anything from your local fashion retailers. We want to bring that more so you have that walkability and you have a very diverse use. We don’t want to just focus on one, you have to give everybody every offering, and every experience.”
Commercial space will include a 40,000-square-foot Sobeys.
Trutina said main street will open later this fall and the whole build out of the project will be between five and 10 years.
According to a retail leasing brochure by CBRE, West District’s average household income within a 10-minute driving radius is 152 per cent above Calgary’s and 181 per cent more than Canada’s. Its average household spending is 148 per cent more than Calgary’s and 168 per cent more than Canada’s.
The CBRE brochure says the master-planned community will bring over 3,500 new dwelling units with an anticipated 7,000 + residents with more than one million square feet of office and 500,000 square feet of retail space. The new community will host over 250 new shops and services creating over 5,000 new jobs with an anticipated 60,000+ year visitors.
Currently, the population surrounding the West District is just over 119,000 people within a five-kilometre radius. CBRE says this is anticipated to increase to 160,700 by 2033, growth of 135 per cent in 10 years.
I like the density of this development. Given that much of Calgary’s newer retail space is dedicated to car-centric power centres, the West District could be the new walkable, vibrant neighbourhood that the city needs. It would be great to see more projects like this.