City of Victoria staff have put together a report which recommends the city council decline an application to build a 12-storey hotel on the site of the historic Plaza Hotel, which housed the iconic Monty’s strip club.
Six years after the Plaza Hotel on the corner of Pandora Avenue and Government Street burnt down, the site remains an empty lot.
However, city council will be discussing an application to build a new hotel in its place that would be a proposed 12-storeys, offering approximately 200 rooms.
This proposal is proving to be tricky, and all the nuances of city bylaws and plans that would have to be amended have been detailed in a 17-page report on the matter, in which City staff recommend council declines the proposal.
In order for the project to get the green light as-is, the Victoria council would have to amend its Official Community Plan (OCP), as well as approve a Rezoning Application, a Development Permit with Variances Application, a Heritage Alteration Permit and lastly, amend a heritage designation bylaw.
The reason for all these amendments is that the site falls within a zoning area of the city designated as Old Town District-1 Zone (OTD-1).
In OTD-1, City bylaws only allow buildings to be a maximum of four commercial storeys, or five residential storeys.
According to the report, the aim of these zoning bylaws is so the downtown core of the city can “retain its compact, diverse, low-scale and small-lot character, all of which contribute to it being a major tourist draw for Victoria.”
City Councillor Matt Dell turned to his online community in order to gauge a consensus on whether or not they believe 12-storeys is too tall for the area.
“Cities in BC are desperate for new hotels,” wrote Dell in a Facebook post. “Hotel rooms reduce pressure on rental housing, bring huge economic benefits, and support vibrancy downtown.”
“BUT – this week at council, city staff recommend [sic] council reject this 12-story building (Pandora/Government – the old Monty’s) because it is ‘too tall.’ Thoughts?”
To this prompt, there were some who supported the idea of a taller hotel.
“Going to be hard to get a hotelier to invest in a property that they can’t put enough rooms in. It’ll have to be about that size I’d think,” wrote one commenter.
“Victoria is growing beyond its means whether we like it or not. With water on most sides and Saanich and Esquimalt on the others, where else do we have to go but up? “Too tall” is not a luxury we have anymore,” said another.
Meanwhile, others said the renderings of the possible hotel did indeed look too tall for the area.
“Elsewhere downtown I’d say it’s fine, but the Old Town is different,” wrote another commenter. “I think it’s too tall.”
“I think the guiding approach to the Old Town should be ‘the urbanism here is really good and anything we add should fit in with what’s already there’ instead of ‘we can improve this place by significantly changing it.’”
The report made by City staff and the matter of building heights in the Old Town District will be discussed at length at this week’s committee of the whole meeting, on Thursday, May 8th.
Below are some renderings of what the proposed 12-storey hotel would look like:
