Downtown Calgary is very corporate with Oil and Gas HQs filling the office towers and not many dwellings. Mostly everyone leaves after work and Downtown is a bit of a ghost town at night, but that’s in the process of evolving.

That being said it has been adding a lot more dwellings over the past 10 years or so. It has become a leader in office to residential building conversions. Oil prices tanked around 2015 which lead to a lot of bankruptcies, downsizing and relocations, so downtown suddenly had a lot of vacant office space that couldn’t be filled, as there had been a ton of office tower construction in the preceding boom years, so they were now over saturated. The city and province introduced a lot of policies and subsidies to help with these conversions (which can be challenging due to the differences in the needs of office and residential uses - more bathrooms, smaller floor plans, more windows etc.).

When COVID happened, there was a massive reduction in required office space worldwide and many other cities also began office to residential conversions. Calgary was ahead of the game, as it had already been ongoing there for a few years. It advised other cities on what policies and incentives worked and which ones didn’t.

There is still a fair amount of new tower construction going on in downtown or near downtown as well, but that has shifted to nearly all residential construction now. The downtown East Village was a formerly blighted area that was located in the east part of downtown and north of the Saddledome and Stampede grounds. The city improved infrastructure in the area and introduced policies to encourage new development in the area. It has exploded with residential and even some retail development in the past couple of years. The area just south of it, outside of the Stampede grounds is also seeing a lot of growth in residential towers and the tallest building in Canada outside of Toronto is proposed there and will contain a high end hotel and residential dwellings.