Calgary Is Converting Abandoned Offices Into Housing Oct 16th

When Maxim Olshevsky stepped inside 909 5th Ave. SW, a 10-storey building in downtown Calgary, he could have sworn he was looking at the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. Frayed cubicle walls loomed over piles of expired contracts; name tags lay abandoned on dust-blanketed desks. To most, this would be source material for an episode of The Last of Us; to Olshevsky, a Calgary-based real estate and construction entrepreneur with a soft spot for bringing things back from the dead, it was pure potential.

A hot tip had led Olshevsky to the site in 2021; in the four years prior, his company, Astra Real Estate Group, had focused on foreclosed and condemned buildings, projects in need of a serious overhaul. “That became our niche,” he says. “All of a sudden, we started getting calls: ‘Hey! Wanna look at this building that’s falling apart?’”

Having established himself as a de facto fixer of fixer-uppers, Olshevsky was unfazed when he surveyed what remained of 909. The mid-rise, built in 1979 according to aesthetic specs reminiscent of a Buick Skylark, had been mostly abandoned since 2015, when SNC Lavalin rescinded its naming rights and pulled its operations; while two straggler tenants remained on-site, the bulk of its 12,000-square-metre space was empty…