The project of developing Le Faubourg Chateauguay still figures in Westcliff’s plans but the COVID-19 virus is presenting itself as a new obstacle, according to Marc Montpetit, regional director of the building development society.
“We have not abandoned it at all,” Montpetit assured in an interview on Monday, August 10. “We are still working on it.”
The hotel announced in the spring of 2016 was to begin taking concrete shape but the coronavirus changed the deal, Montpetit explained. “We were at the point of beginning certain works and the COVID slowed us down,” he noted. “We are hoping to start the work in 2021,” he confirmed.
Reinventing the product
The COVID-19 is also forcing a change of plan. “In the conventional clothing business, many chains are having lots of difficulty surviving” Montpetit said. “We have to reinvent the product. It’s highly probable that the wearing is going to be a bit different than what we had foreseen.”
This will not be the first time that Westcliff is readjusting the target date. In January of 2016, it decided to rely on big businesses rather than small retailers to develop its site in Chateauguay. The commercial complex was to have seen the day in the footsteps of the opening of Autoroute 30 nearby. Open in January of 2013, Walmart is still alone on the site. There has been no development in seven years.
Several crises
“In retail business, this is not the first crisis we have encountered,” Montpetit justifies. As an example, he gives the closing of the Sears and Target stores in recent years, both of which occupied large spaces. “That reduced the number of players for new businesses and it put thousands of square feet of space on the market to rent,” Montpetit explained. The phenomenon voided Le Faubourg Chateauguay’s further development. “It’s less costly to establish oneself in an existing building than to build from scratch in a new one,” concluded the Westcliff official.
(Translation Dan Rosenburg)
