The Y is moving a couple of blocks north into downtown, and that’ll mean free parking for patrons when the workout facility relocates to the top floor of the Bay Centre, where it has signed a 10-year lease.

“It’s great news,” Derek Gent, YMCA/YWCA of Vancouver Island CEO, tells Capital Daily. “It’s a long time coming.”

In 2018, the Y sold its building on Broughton to Concert Properties—which plans a large housing development in its place—and has been leasing it back through continued extensions. The Y has been looking for new digs since and last fall, it hit paydirt when a Goodlife Fitness studio closed and left the Bay Centre.  

“That's when we started the conversations with the Bay Centre, and it's just such a perfect match of the Y needing a space that big, that's sort of custom and available, and then the traffic that we bring,” Gent said.

The Y plans to move into the large, 20K-square-foot space, which features a food court and an outdoor patio, early next year, Gent said. He estimates that about a thousand people use the Y each day, about one-fifth of its membership of approximately 5K.

They’ll be able to park underground for free for two hours, Gent said, an improvement over the current situation with members vying for 35 outdoor spots.

But there is some bad news. The new Y won’t have a pool, gymnasium, or any racquet sport courts, something Gent estimates 10-15% of the membership uses.

“That's the saddest part of this,” Gent said. “The prospect of finding a space that had all of those pieces was just too daunting.”

The plan is to seek, piecemeal, those missing pieces elsewhere, Gent said.

“There are other places, certainly to play basketball and volleyball, and we want to do as much as we can to serve the people that currently use the Y.”

Pool situation is a moving target

The pool situation can’t be approached as swimmingly, especially with the recent closure of UVic’s McKinnon Pool, which needs $5M in upgrades to remain viable, and the imminent shutdown of Crystal Pool, which is to be razed and replaced with new facility for which the city plans to borrow as much as $162.2M.

Gent said the Y will seek pool time at downtown hotels and possibly condos to accommodate swimmers.

“I look and see that there are already 10 pools downtown that could potentially be programmed, but we weren't able to put a pool together into this deal, Gent said.

Coun. Jeremy Caradonna said he was “delighted” with the news, particularly in light of the retail hit the Bay Centre sustained when the Hudson’s Bay Company filed for bankruptcy. 

“With the impending loss of The Bay nationwide, malls will be looking for new anchor tenants,” he said.

“You can’t ask for a better one than the Y. They will bring families and other residents to downtown at a time when we need investment and activation in the core.”

Caradonna said while he laments the fact that the Y sold its property without reinvesting in a new one and that the pool won’t be replaced given the circumstances, it’s very good news for downtown that the Y is landing on its feet in a high-profile location.”

Caradonna, who said city staff is looking into proposals to investigate ways of accommodating swimmers who will be displaced once Crystal Pool is closed sometime within the next two years, is in agreement with Gent, who says a city on the shores of an ocean needs access to swimming pools. 

“To me, it's not just sort of the health and wellness of the pool users, but there's a public safety parameter here, too: if kids don't get swimming lessons, they're not safe,” Gent said.