Proposed Walmart near Kensington Market has residents fuming

It’s a retail drama that’s playing out across the continent: big box stores show up on the outskirts of town and mom and pop shops bitterly shutter their doors.

But what happens when the big stores try to move in downtown?

RioCan, the country’s largest real estate investment trust, has submitted plans to the city to build a three-storey retail complex downtown, just past the western fringe of Kensington Market.

If approved, it would house the mother of all discount retailers, the archetypal box store: Walmart.

The prospective arrival of the American chain, whose presence has long been opposed by downtown denizens, has neighbourhood residents and councillors fuming.

“It’s something which must be fought at every single corner and on every single street,” said Councillor Adam Vaughan, adding Walmart would gut small businesses in Kensington Market and elsewhere in his ward.

“We cannot allow this kind of big box retail to cannibalize and destroy the downtown core.”

RioCan CEO Ed Sonshine confirmed Tuesday Walmart will be the building’s chief tenant if the development is approved at the site of the Kromer Radio store at Bathurst and Nassau Sts.

Sonshine said the store would create hundreds of jobs and provide cheap goods and groceries to people of “limited means” who live in the area.

“There’s often this hair-trigger response when you hear the word ‘Walmart’ that I think, unfortunately, is often ideologically driven,” said Sonshine.

“I think there’s this whole population that is perhaps being ignored by this sort of anti-Walmart frenzy.”

An initial RioCan proposal for the site was rejected by city council last May.

In December, the Ontario Municipal Board agreed to quash the plan, concluding the development proposal was significant enough to warrant a site-specific rezoning bylaw amendment, rather than the series of minor variances being sought.

RioCan has since resubmitted its application and the proposal is expected to go before community council in the coming weeks, Vaughan said.

The plan calls for a 125,000-square-foot retail building between 410 and 440 Bathurst St., where Walmart would occupy the second and third floors, said Sonshine.

The ground level would consist of several convenience outlets, like banks or drugstores, with underground parking for more than 300 vehicles.

“This will be a very beautiful building. This will not look like a Walmart,” said Sonshine, describing it as an “urban” variant of the famously squat and sprawling box store. “We think this is what fits with the neighbourhood.”

Honest Ed’s, the perennially glitzy bargain warehouse, sits north of the site, at Bloor and Bathurst Sts. The potential competitor’s reaction to the Walmart proposal is relatively relaxed.

“We’ve had large stores and small stores go up everywhere around us,” said general manager Russell Lazar, who’s worked at Honest Ed’s since 1958, when he was 7.

“We don’t begrudge anybody that wants to do business,” he said. “It makes you sharper when you have competition.”

The mood is starkly different in Kensington Market, where residents and businesses have been agitating for months against a separate plan to bring in a Loblaw’s grocery store.

Dominique Russell, an organizer with the community group, Friends of Kensington Market, said she was “horrified” to learn of the Walmart proposal. There’s a prevailing sense among residents that such development threatens the market’s character, she said.

“A lot of communities downtown are feeling almost under siege,” said Russell. “If this proposal goes forward, it’s going to be a huge battle.”

The city’s planning department will host a public meeting on the Kromer Radio site proposal at 7 p.m. on June 6, at the College St. United Church.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author:  Alex Ballingall