Regarding the letter suggesting Victoria Hudson’s Bay stores should be used for housing, I’m curious to know whether the writer has been to downtown Victoria in the past decade.
The original Bay store is a market and has had multiple dwellings built to house everyone mentioned in the writer's list. As for the properties the Bay stores presently occupy. They are both located in shopping malls and not really residential buildings.
The Bay has done well to be among the last of the department store holdouts. They probably should have been sold a decade ago, as the decline in department stores has seen the demise of Woodwards, Eatons, Sears, Zellers, K-Mart and Target, and there doesn’t appear to be anyone remaining to buy up these large premises in shopping malls.
Short of repurposing them into coffee shops, pot/vape stores, phone kiosks, and Dollaramas, I don’t know of many other businesses that could survive.
Darren Gilby
Saanich
