Province wants to speed sale of 243 surplus properties

Thestar.com
December 5, 2018
Tess Kalinowski

The Ontario government is expediting the sell-off of 243 surplus government properties on 14,600 acres to raise between $105 million and $135 million in the next four years.

The plots range from old jails and psychiatric hospitals to empty lots. About 50 of the properties are in the Toronto and Hamilton area, including 20 in the city of Toronto. Among those is the old Thistletown Regional Centre, a children’s mental health facility in Etobicoke that closed in 2012, and 27 Grosvenor St. next door to the Coroner’s Court downtown.

Selling the unused real estate will save taxpayers $9.5 million annually in maintenance such as heating and grass cutting, according to Government and Consumer Services Minister Bill Walker.

“There’s absolutely no value coming from that,” he said on Tuesday, citing a former OPP detachment in North Bay that has been vacant for about a decade.

Some of the sites could be redeveloped as affordable housing or long-term care facilities. Others would generate revenue for government services.

“If there’s a really high-end property and we can realize that, that’s not necessarily the place you’re going to put affordable housing or a long-term care facility. You’re not going to sell a waterfront property and put affordable housing there because you can maximize that and move the affordable housing where you can build twice as much,” Walker said.

The government is promising to trim about 150 days from the bureaucracy that accompanies the sale of surplus real estate, including heritage properties. That will be done by reducing the days the real estate briefs are circulated to other governments and agencies to see if they are interested in repurposing the sites and by eliminating the environmental assessment that takes place before these properties are sold. Purchasers would still have to do that assessment, Walker said.

He said every property would be appraised and sold at fair market value.

“We’ll do our due diligence,” he said.

But NDP Housing Critic Suze Morrison accused the Progressive Conservatives of asking a “shockingly low price” that “works out to around $550,000 per property, or $9,000 per acre.”

“That appears to be a rock-bottom, fire-sale price,” she said in a press release.

The NDP also criticized the government for failing to guarantee that the real estate proceeds will be funnelled back into affordable housing.

The Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada said it is awaiting details but it supports the move to make better use of surplus public land.

“It’s imperative that a significant portion of government land is dedicated to affordable housing, including co-ops and other non-profit housing,” said Simone Swail, government relations manager.

The City of Toronto was blindsided last week to learn the provincially owned Ontario Power Generation’s Hearn Generating Station on Toronto’s eastern waterfront has been sold for $16 million to longtime tenant Studios of America. Critics called it a “paltry” sum, compared to the $275 million that OPG made by selling the much larger Lakeview Generating Station in Mississauga to developers.

The 243 properties on the provincial sales list represent only about half of the surplus real estate in the government’s portfolio. The remainder have still to be approved for sale, Walker said.