Sault Blog

After the great 2008 housing crisis, the United States Federal Government acknowledged an oversupply of housing and other dead building assets that cities, towns, and municipalities could no longer deal with. These dead assets stigmatized their cities, blighted their communities, took up space on valuable serviced infrastructure, did not pay municipal taxes, and killed potential urban re-development.

This realization prompted the creation of the TARP (Temporary Asset Relief Program) super-fund. This massive super-fund was available to municipalities requiring assistance in urban blight removal and infrastructure re-development.

Cities like Detroit, Saginaw, Bay, Flint, and Midland, Michigan, applied for the TARP program and received funds to target and remove tens of thousands of blighted houses and industrial, commercial, and institutional buildings with significant effect. These cities are turning the corner from blighted rust-belt cities to vibrant post-industrial, modern IT-driven cities.

Every city, town, or community in Northern Ontario has exactly the same problem that Michigan had: a decades-long acceptance of a Culture of Blight. Travel and view any community in Northern Ontario, whether it is downtown Port Arthur or Fort William in Thunder Bay, downtown North Bay or Sudbury, Chelmsford, Spanish, Wawa, or Manitouwadge, full of dead asset buildings everywhere.

Northern Ontario requires a TARP super-fund, but the city that really desperately needs it is Sault Ste. Marie. The Old Hospitals are a prime example of why a strategic TARP plan is required. It’s a much better way of providing the necessary plan, strategy, and budget to deal with dead asset buildings.

For decades, our City Administration ignored the cost of blight in our community; what is the dollar value associated with cleaning up our City? What is the impact of the decades-long accumulation of blight on our City? How can our City spur economic urban housing re-development, deal with municipal tax polarity, and get the City Tax Mill Rate down?

Nobody was better than Mr. Tom Vair, in charge of the “think-tank” the taxpayer funded Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre, seventeen years ago to do precisely that. Mr. Tom Vair, from the IT sector, was hired to use the GIS systems for strategic city planning. Unfortunately, the taxpayer-funded GIS systems were not used to produce studies of tax polarity and tax unfairness in our City, the assessment gap in our City’s neighborhoods, the extensive area of blight in our City, and the solutions needed like TARP to deal with them.

The Sault needed a Strategic TARP Plan to deal with the accumulation of blighted housing and dead asset buildings in our community. There are houses in this City that have been boarded up for over 44 years, dead asset buildings everywhere, and vehicular corridors like Albert and Wellington Street that leave a terrible impression on our citizens and tourists alike. Our City has the highest percentage of old housing stock of any city in Ontario; some neighbourhoods with 25% of housing requiring extensive renovation. Gore Street and Jamestown require a TARP program with a significant budget for a real transformative change.

The Old Hospitals needed a TARP program ready when they were deemed surplus by the Hospital Board. These dead asset buildings should have been absorbed into the TARP program immediately. The Hospital Board admittedly proclaimed the lack of knowledge and experience in dealing with all aspects of this dead surplus building asset; their only objective was to discard this highly contaminated dead asset to anyone without any obligations to clean up the property after almost 80 years of use.

A TARP super-fund would empower shifting the responsibility to the City Building and Planning Department with the financial resources to remove blighted, dead asset buildings effectively. In essence, the City Building Department is responsible for the public safety of the abatement, demolition, and disposal of the Old Hospitals; something our City Building Department has never wanted to take the responsibility to do.

The failure to establish a TARP program has led to many bad precedents with the “sale” of the Old Hospitals:

Allowing the Hospital Administration to sell the Old Hospital without a proper performance or standards contract; leading to an exaggerated buy-back price.

Allowing a Culture of Blight to perpetuate for 12 years at the Old Hospital Site.

A loss of potential economic housing development activity around $75M and a loss of potential municipal tax yields of $10M.

Due to the lack of city ownership of the old hospitals, the City Planning Department was not allowed to determine the best use of the property for the greater benefit of our city. For example, our City Administration commissioned a Waterfront Linear Park Study by the Toronto Consultant to increase the St. Mary’s River Park System. Unfortunately, after spending all this money, we did not reserve any property near the St. Mary’s River to, in fact, increase the Waterfront Linear Park System.

Failing to create a Federal and Provincially funded TARP program pushes all the financial responsibility of urban blight removal to the municipal taxpayer. In this particular Old Hospital case, the municipal taxpayer will pay over $4M in cash and in-kind services, but the Federal and Provincial Governments did not pay a dime for the abatement, demolition, and disposal of the Old Hospitals that essentially belonged to them.

The new Old Hospital deal provides benefits to select “developers” with financial benefits from the City that are not equally available to other builders or developers.

The lack of a TARP program means more Managers, Lawyers, and Property Standard Officers are hired on staff to deal with a housing blight problem that has no real strategic plan or budget solution.

The favouritism of financial benefits like vendor take-back mortgages, no-interest loans, and free infrastructure development to a local business but not others.

The lack of a TARP program to expropriate and demolish blighted, boarded-up houses in our City for decades allowed Toronto Housing Corporations easy access to our City. These blighted, boarded-up houses should have been removed a long, long time ago.

The Old Hospitals are not the only blighted buildings in our City. Our City requires a Federal and Provincially funded TARP program to deal with the many blocks of depressed housing, Gore Street de-mapping, Jamestown social housing re-development, downtown dead asset building removal, Albert and Wellington Street Corridor clean-ups, and other projects as deemed necessary.

Unfortunately, after seventeen years, Mr. Tom Vair, CAO, still does not include the TARP program in his new Strategic Plan for the City of Sault Ste. Marie.

Mark Menean,
saultblog.com