Mrdjenovich signs off with final buildings near completion

Milan Mrdjenovich said he was closing a Yellowknife chapter of his home-building career as he gave a tour of a 70-unit apartment complex, The View, last week.

The building, in the Niven neighbourhood on Hagel Drive, is about to open. Sixteen of the units have been rented in the week and a half since Mrdjenovich’s company began showing people around.

Once The View opens, Mrdjenovich has one more local job for his firm to finish – a 24-unit building across the street, likely to be finished later this year – and that, he says, will be that.

“We already broke ground in Edmonton and I’ve got two buildings to finish off in Iqaluit,” he said, listing off other projects. He also wants to spend more time being a dad.

“I said to my wife I was going up for one year, eight years ago. I gotta get back.”

Mrdjenovich has had a complicated relationship with Yellowknife, following in the footsteps of his father – Mike Mrdjenovich – whose own style was described as “skirting the edge of the allowable” over decades of builds.

The junior Mrdjenovich, who was born in Yellowknife, has similarly riled some residents and had run-ins with city officials. He, like his father, pledged to stop building in the city after some residents tried to stop a development going ahead.

Unlike his father, who made that threat in 2000 but spent nearly two more decades working in Yellowknife, Milan said last week he is following through.

“I am going to miss it,” he said. “I love this town. It’s a home away from home for me. I was born here. I spent a lot of time here.”

But, he added, building in Yellowknife is “pretty difficult” compared to other places and the cost of building, particularly in the NWT, is high.

“It’s not easy to do this any more. I don’t envy anybody that tries to come behind me. It’s getting more and more expensive,” he said.

“From Covid to now, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna come back down.’ The lumber came down. It went like this, and then like this,” he added, miming a price going almost vertically upward and then dipping back ever so slightly, leaving the cost of lumber down a little from its peak but much higher than it had been.

“The carbon tax came in and everybody jacked everything up again. So the cost to build now is… I don’t know if I could do another one and build it for what I’ve been doing now.”

The View’s 70 units are split into 15 one-bed homes with the remainder offering two beds. (Mrdjenovich said anything more than a two-bed is now uneconomical to build.)

The reason for the name is the view afforded – from some units, at least – of Back Bay and the forest around the city’s ski club.

Initial rental prices are $2,400 or so for a one-bed unit and $3,225 for a two-bed. Mrdjenovich said those prices reflect the cost of getting something like this built.

Touring the four-storey building, he emphasized the effort that had gone into soundproofing rooms and creating layouts that people would want.

In the corridors, the colour scheme is a series of blues with photos of Yellowknife aurora scenes on the walls.

“That was the wife’s idea. I don’t have that creativity,” Mrdjenovich said of the framed photos. “And we were a little hesitant on the blue when we first put it up,” he continued, though he has since warmed to it.

Counting off four or five buildings he has built in Yellowknife – the likes of the West Bay condos near Tin Can Hill and the Pine Hills complex on School Draw Avenue – Mrdjenovich concluded his firm has “accomplished a lot” in the city.

Another building, completed last September opposite the Mrdjenovich family-owned Chateau Nova Hotel, will now offer extended-stay rooms managed by the hotel, he said, as the hotel – like others in the city – has been running for months at 100-percent occupancy.

That 54-unit building, the Nova Niven, had been the source of controversy last year when people who applied to live there were told their applications would not be going ahead. The switch to the hotel’s control appears to explain why that happened, and the hotel is understood to be in the process of furnishing it.

While Mrdjenovich said he was leaving Yellowknife on Sunday with no plan to return for any meaningful length of time, it’s noteworthy that he has a request moving through council that would make it easier for him to build on a vacant lot in the city’s Kam Lake neighbourhood.

Asked about his plans for that land, Mrdjenovich said the lot might be something his kids get to manage, eight or 10 years from now – a new generation of Mrdjenoviches building in the community.