Portage Avenue was the site of a Perkins at 2675 Portage for many years until the restaurant group faltered under its new ownership and switched over to RnR Restaurant just before the pandemic, along with two other locations. The year 2019 was terrible for Perkins, which went bankrupt and now only exists in Ontario in Canada. The total number of locations in North America is likely under 250. RnR took over three locations, and now it is just down to the Portage Avenue location.
RnR Portage continues to operate, but the location is just too big for 2024. The huge breakfast and late-night crowds don’t exist anymore. The land they occupy has become far more valuable.
The low density along Portage Avenue has been very surprising given that it is the High Street of the city. It is a very long line of commercial buildings, but surprisingly, many are just one or two floors. Often, we see strip malls with parking in the front. There is a striking lack of apartment buildings along the entire length from Portage and Main to Headingley. For example, there is very little housing in the downtown area along Portage. The West End is spotty at best. Multi-residential units were recently built where the Palomino Club is.
St. James is where you see apartments of some size on both the north and south sides of the street. In the 1960s and 1970s, the apartments drove public transit and commuter demand up and down Portage Avenue, which continues today. Since that initial construction, apartment building along the St. James stretch has been sporadic. Developers generally have shied away from already developed land in favor of land from closed schools and the like, or on the fringes north of Ness.
The fringes just don’t have as good road and public transit or development. In Headingley, there are a ton of apartments going up in the area beyond the Perimeter Highway.
Elsewhere on Portage, it isn’t easy to acquire land even when some places remain empty, such as the former Robin’s on Portage. Some of the strips of commercial land on Portage are surprisingly narrow. There are also quite a lot of zoning setbacks from the road, which waste a lot of space. The city expects buildings to be built back 20 feet from the sidewalk. Many builders could use that space for more units.
In the above picture, you can see the Courts of St. James to get an idea of the scale of the new place. At 7 floors and 150 units, it is not crazy big. The building comes right to the sidewalk, giving it street presence. An apart
ment of similar size across the street, with a parking lot in front, has no street presence at all. A commercial unit is promised for the new apartment, but I have no idea where it is based on the picture.
While restaurants are an important part of Portage Avenue, single-floor buildings with vast parking lots, like The Keg, take up a lot of space. It should be noted that The Keg was building a new location downtown as part of an apartment building when financing fell through. It was going to rely on parking in the surrounding area rather than having a surface lot. There are parts of Portage that have underground or parkade parking for their commercial or apartment buildings. Superstore is a good example.
Parking is in the back of the new apartment building with lane access. There are fewer parking spaces than units. There are many bike storage units in the underground parkade. The design is U-shaped.
Contrast the new apartment with the Courts of St. James and their mall next door with their setbacks. The city has pushed development back from the sidewalk for no discernible reason. It isn’t needed here.
Manitoba has the fastest percentage growth in 2024 of any area except Alberta and Yukon. Every apartment that goes up is filled almost immediately. The city should move quickly to approve this build. As for the former Perkins, now RnR, it will harken back to a time of larger breakfast-focused casual dining places of a different era. Could that time come back? Anything is possible, but restaurants seem to be decreasing their footprint. As we are seeing in other cities, restaurants on main roads are being bought for higher density buildings.
