ɫ��ɫ

Winnipeg’s True North Real Estate Development (TNRED) has officially acquired the city’s downtown Portage Place mall, putting in motion the company’s plan to redevelop the site.

TNRED recently signed the final paperwork with the North Portage Development Corp., Premise Properties and Spruceland Mall Ltd. on the mall, its land and assets.

The completion of the sale clears the way for the mostly vacant mall’s long-awaited $650-million redevelopment to finally begin.

TNRED had announced in September it would proceed with the project, but it had to wait until the sale closed before anything more could be done.

Built in 1987, the 1.2-million-square-foot mall sits on 6.4 acres of prime land on downtown Portage Avenue.

The bulky suburban-style shopping mall is out of place in a part of the city that is increasingly known for poverty, addiction and homelessness.

At the heart of the Portage Place redevelopment is a 265,000-square-foot health care centre. It will integrate primary care, mental-health services, surgery, diagnostics and other medical programs, including an expanded Pan Am Clinic.

The mixed-use project will also contain a grocery store, community centres and office space for social agencies.

True North, which also owns the Winnipeg Jets hockey team, is partnering with Southern Chiefs’ Organization (SCO) to deliver and manage the development’s housing component, a 15-storey multi-residential tower that will be called TN-SCO Housing 92 Inc.

In late 2023, TNRED and SCO agreed to collaborate on the Portage Place redevelopment as well as the transformation of the former Hudson’s Bay Company department store, on the south side of Portage Avenue from the mall. 

The redevelopment will be undertaken in stages.

Site preparations will begin this year and foundation work for the health and housing projects will start in April 2025.

TNRED president Jim Ludlow says the housing component of the project should be completed by the end of 2027 and the entire development built by the end of 2028.

The project has received significant financial backing from all levels of government.

The federal government has committed $10 million to support public spaces, while the Manitoba government will lease the health care tower and fund medical services to the tune of approximately $77 million per year.

Winnipeg City Council approved $40 million in incentives, which include $10 million in federal housing funding earmarked for the city.

Cindy Tugwell, long-standing executive director of Heritage Winnipeg, supports the redevelopment plan.

“It’s a massive building on the city’s main street,” says Tugwell. “Something has to be done with it. The city is in sore need of affordable housing and the redevelopment of Portage Place and the Hudson’s Bay building provide it.

“The development is critical to the survival of our downtown.”

University of Winnipeg professor of urban geography Jino Distasio says the redevelopment plan is a joint effort by the private and public sectors to get Portage Place right this time.

“Three levels of government all financially contributed to the original Portage Place project in the 1980s,” says Distasio. “It didn’t work out as a retail mall, and now government is trying again by ‘adaptively reusing’ it into something more fitting for the neighbourhood.

“Let’s hope it works out better the second time around. This time the private sector, in the form of True North, is playing a more important role and it looks like they’re taking a more thoughtful approach.”

Winnipeg historian Christian Cassidy says he’s “not sure” what could have been done differently with Portage Place.

“Talk of selling or redeveloping the mall has been around for years and there weren’t a lot of buyers or developers lined up,” says Cassidy. “A large downtown retail mall in many cities have failed as the retail landscape has changed.”

In addition, Portage Place is just a short drive from Polo Park, the city’s largest mall.

“That type of retail was never going to come back, so I don’t think there were many options for Portage Place,” he says.

Cassidy says the three levels of government “have a lot of skin in the game with the mall and the north side of Portage Avenue.

“Using their leverage to get some community amenities is probably cheaper than looking for vacant land and building new housing and social services from scratch,” he says.

Aaron Moore, University of Winnipeg professor of political science, is

pessimistic about the prospects for the Portage Place renovation. 

“Will it really transform downtown? There have been other downtown projects that have promised to be transformational, but they weren’t,” says Moore. “One single project won’t deliver change.”