Now that Edmonton City Centre's ownership company has entered receivership, leaving the fate of the mall an open question, one American urban expert who toured our downtown recently said its 1.4-million square feet of retail and office space should be transformed into housing or something that isn't retail but meets the city's changing needs.
"We have to leave no stone unturned right now," Larisa Ortiz, a New York-based managing director at Streetsense, a multidisciplinary planning firm that offers downtown strategies among its many services, told Taproot. "We have to start thinking out of the box."
In July, Edmonton City Centre Inc. entered receivership, and reports suggest it owes its creditors nearly $140 million. The company owns the mall, TD Tower, 102A Tower, Centre Point Place, and associated parkades. Edmonton City Centre dates back to 1974, when a mall called Edmonton Centre opened west of 101 Street. In 1987, the newly built Eaton Centre opened to the east, across 101 Street, and the malls merged in 1999.
In 2019, Chicago-based LaSalle Investment Management and other investors bought these properties from Toronto-based Oxford Properties for more than $300 million. Several anchor tenants left shortly after that. Hudson's Bay Company closed its 168,000 square-foot location in 2020; Sport Chek closed its store at the mall in 2023.
Ortiz has worked to redevelop downtown malls of a similar age and size to Edmonton City Centre in the United States. She said the redevelopment of the 870,000 square-foot Galleria at White Plains, in downtown White Plains, NY, offers an example of what Edmonton could do with its mall. The new owners of the Galleria are demolishing it and replacing it with housing and far fewer shops.
"It's a $2.5 billion project that really is creating a new neighbourhood," Ortiz said. "If you had a clean slate (where Edmonton City Centre is), you could get quite a bit of housing."
Housing, fittingly, is taking most of the place of retail at the redeveloped District Galleria. The new owners, including a bank and a capital partner group, are building 3,000 housing units, of which 800 will be affordable. Retail will have just 100,000 square feet of space at the new development, Ortiz said.
In November, the Edmonton Downtown Business Association hosted Ortiz at its Imagining Downtown: A Global Comparison event. At the event, Ortiz suggested retail is not what Edmonton's downtown needs more of. "What do we need to do to eliminate and right-size the amount of retail you have in this downtown environment?" she asked at the event.
Ortiz has worked with American clients to replace struggling downtown malls with schools, or even sell the properties to municipal governments. Right now, she's exploring the potential of one such property in Chicago to host film workers, healthcare offices, or an elevator-based parking structure.
A former mall's new purpose depends on its city's specific needs, she said. "You have to know a market really well (to adapt a property), and look around and start pulling threads. What's interesting? What opportunities are here?"
During a visit to Edmonton in November, before the City Centre Mall went into receivership, Larisa Ortiz (left), who specializes in re-imagining what to do with urban malls when they fail, said Edmonton had too much retail space in its downtown. Ortiz is pictured in November speaking with Puneeta McBryan (right), and developer Henry Edgar (centre). (Supplied)
The municipal government in Norfolk, VA, is pulling those threads, Ortiz said. Norfolk city council voted to purchase the MacArthur Center mall in 2023 for roughly $11 million, with an additional roughly $7 million allotted for various fees associated with the purchase. The mall opened in 1999 and cost about $300 million, Ortiz added. In April, the city of Norfolk announced that it has hired a master planner to redevelop the MacArthur Center.
Taproot contacted La Caisse, a creditor that Edmonton City Centre Inc. owes, as well as LaSalle Investment Management, to ask what will happen next with the mall.
"La Caisse is maintaining a dialogue with the court-appointed administrator in order to maximize the recovery of the initial investment," Marjaurie Côté-Boileau, the company's director of media relations, said.
LaSalle, meanwhile, did not respond.
Mall as election issue?
In a recent post, Puneeta McBryan, the executive director of the Edmonton Downtown Business Association, said she's worked for five years to address what the mall's decline has meant for downtown.
McBryan was responding to Paul Bakhmut, who's held senior policy and advisory positions with the Alberta government and announced that he is running for mayor in the days after McBryan made the comment.
Bakhmut posted that it's "time to roll up our sleeves" on downtown, in reference to the mall's receivership.
Brad Ferguson, who once headed the now-defunct Edmonton Economic Development Corporation, which was revised into Explore Edmonton, said on LinkedIn that he's heard "crickets" about the mall's closure from candidates running for council or mayor.
In the days following these posts, Michael Walters, a mayoral candidate and a former councillor, said he will propose a revitalization strategy for the mall properties in September. Appearing in the video with Walters was Raka Josan, head of Josan Properties. The company recently purchased the Phipps-McKinnon Building, which is less than a block from the mall, and is converting part of it into housing.
Meanwhile, Stantec, another adjacent corporate downtown resident, which consolidated five of its offices into one downtown tower with the development of ICE District, has offered its own insights on redeveloping malls. The company cited data from 2020 that estimated 25% of American malls would close within three to five years.