New BrunswickThe Brunswick Square mall and connected office tower have been emptying out for a decade. Now there’s a renewed attempt to make it a community hub once again, using ideas like converting office floors to residential space.CEO Shant Poladian is looking for community input on the future of Brunswick SquareMark Leger · CBC News · Posted: Oct 13, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 4 hours agoJason Gomke, right, opened Foggy City in the Brunswick Square food court to serve the high school students in the area. (Mark Leger/CBC) Jason Gomke remembers the “way it used to be” in Brunswick Square, when McDonald’s anchored a first-floor food court that was always full of high school students and Starbucks was a mainstay on the second floor for the office workers from the commercial tower.The Starbucks closed first, in 2016, and the McDonald’s followed in 2020, part of a gradual emptying of the city-centre mall in the last decade that accelerated during the pandemic.Gomke began going to the mall as a high school kid in the 1980s and then spent 20 years working in the Uptown area after graduating from university. He believes the mall can make a comeback — and he’s so confident that he’s opened a takeout in the food court geared at high school students and a souvenir and ice cream shop on the second floor.WATCH | ‘No one really wants to walk by an empty building’:It takes a community to bring back a mallThe owner of a shopping centre and office tower in Uptown Saint John wants local input on breathing new life into a once-bustling hub. “I used to be up here every day for 20 years and it was just so busy,” Gomke said. “The food court was always packed, not empty like it is today. And they still have the two high schools in this area, so you still have 1,000 kids in this general area that like the type of food I’m offering. “You also have all the businesses and residents, so the plan is to tailor to the kids and… the business people and residents too.” No one really wants to walk by an empty building every day. It gives you that hollow feeling.- Shant Poladian, CEO of Ravelin PropertiesMalls and office buildings in North American city centres have struggled for a long time now. But the company that owns Brunswick Square and the attached office tower owns buildings worldwide, and it says the problem is worse in Saint John.The office tower has around 180,000 square feet of vacant space, with many empty floors. The vacancy rate on the first floor is around 75 per cent, dropping to more than 30 per cent on the second level. There are a handful of long-term tenants like Lawton’s Drugs, House of Chan and CBC News, though.Ravelin Properties is making a renewed effort to fill vacancies in the the Brunswick Square mall and attached office tower in Uptown Saint John. (Roger Cosman/CBC)The complex was put up for sale last year, but it’s off the market now. Ravelin Properties CEO Shant Poladian said the company is committed to trying to make it work. He pointed to some early results with the addition of businesses like Gomke’s new ventures and a busy tattoo shop on the second floor.“[Putting it up for sale] widens the gap between working with the local community, because they see it as just another landlord who doesn’t want to put money into the property, who doesn’t care about its stature in the city,” said Poladian, who became CEO earlier this year.He knows that people are unhappy with the current state of Brunswick Square and welcomes the community’s help and ideas to make it vibrant again.Ravelin CEO Shant Poladian says the company is committed to making Brunswick Square and the officer tower vibrant hubs again. (Zoom screen capture)“No one really wants to walk by an empty building every day. It gives you that hollow feeling… You don’t really want to have a ghost town. That doesn’t make anybody feel good,” he said.“To the extent that we have capacity to do so, I’d like to fix it hand in hand with government and the local community.”Many studies doneFor decades, urban planners and academics have been trying to figure out how to reverse the decline of malls in city centres.Pierre Filion, a retired professor of urban planning at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, has studied the decline of urban malls and their attempts to reinvent themselves.There has been discussion in past of locating a grocery story in the Brunswick Square mall and residential units in the structure’s office tower. (Roger Cosman/CBC)He said many experts believe the key is population growth, with more people living and working there, shopping for groceries, eating and drinking at local cafés, restaurants and bars, both in the malls themselves and the downtown in general.“One solution to commercial activity downtown is to bring more people to live there because then the downtown main street becomes like a neighborhood main street,” Filion said. “Bring people downtown, and that’s going to bring your downtown back to life.”1,000 more people in past 2 yearsFilion isn’t sure this will revitalize these commercial areas, based on his experience of his own neighbourhood in downtown Kitchener, which has seen large-scale apartment developments without a lot of renewed commercial activity at street level. According to Statistics Canada data pulled together by Envision Saint John, the population in the city’s Central Peninsula has grown by more than 1,000 in the past two years alone, from 8,614 in 2023 to 9,653 in 2025.There are also two large apartment buildings under construction that book-end the Brunswick Square mall and office complex, one on the waterfront and one at the top of King Street.At street level, the Uptown Saint John area has lots of shops, restaurants, bars and coffee shops, but there remains a high vacancy rate in Brunswick Square. (Mark Leger/CBC)The Uptown also has a number of busy shops, restaurants, cafés and bars at street level, but not in Brunswick Square itself.There has been discussion of Brunswick Square filling some critical needs, like hosting a grocery store to serve the growing area.Jeremy Kaupp, the managing director at Ravelin, said national grocery chains have looked at opening a store there, without luck.“We’ve had discussions with national grocers,” he said. “We’ve gone down the roads to planning stores and the bottom line comes back every time to ‘not enough people living in the surrounding area’ to support the type of retail that people remember and want to bring back to Uptown.” Previously there were discussions about converting all or part of the tower to residential. Maybe that’s viable, maybe it isn’t.- A partial solution could rest with the office building, which has many empty floors. Poladian doesn’t expect the office market to recover enough to fill those vacancies. He’s on the board of the company that owns Killam apartment buildings in the region, and said he’s open to traditional office spaces being converted to apartments on empty floors.“Previously there were discussions about converting all or part of the tower to residential,” Poladian said. “Maybe that’s viable, maybe it isn’t. I think we just have to be open-minded about all the potential possibilities here and be collaborative, be transparent��… and honest about what we can do and what we can’t do.”ABOUT THE AUTHORMark Leger is a reporter and producer based in Saint John. Send him story ideas to: mark.leger@cbc.ca
CEO who hates ’empty buildings’ wants advice on revitalizing Uptown Saint John mall
