Sault Blog

The second-most contentious property in our City, after the Downtown Plaza, is the Old Hospital Site. This infamous piece of property has come to symbolize everything that can possibly go wrong with redeveloping or re-purposing an old institutional building site.

In March of 2011, the new 3rd Line Sault Area Hospital was completed at a price tag of $408 million, replacing the waterfront Sault Ste. Marie General and Plummer Memorial Hospital. In my opinion, it would have been far better to expropriate some cheap, adjacent waterfront property and leave the hospital on the waterfront, which I believe was the better natural site for the hospital, while keeping the urban planning theory of a compact, efficient city. Unfortunately, that did not happen, and the old hospitals were deemed redundant.

The Old Hospitals were sold to Toronto Developer #1 for approximately $65,000, with the understanding that all the buildings would be redeveloped. Selling the properties to a private developer was the quick and easy way to hand over the hot contaminated potato as fast as possible; hoping that the private sector would solve all of our City’s urban redevelopment problems; a similar strategy used for the blighted houses in centre, centre/west neighbourhoods in our downtown urban neighbourhoods.

It is unfortunate that any of the three levels of our government could have emulated the Troubled (Temporary) Asset Relief Program (TARP) that provided United States Federal and State funds to municipalities to demolish troubled assets, like our Old Hospitals. This modern urban planning program and policy, created after the 2008 USA housing crisis, helps municipalities remove dead buildings and install utility infrastructure for redevelopment.

At that time, our City did not have federal or provincial support to demolish the Old Hospitals, even though the site was owned by the Ontario Ministry of Health, so it was sold to Toronto Developer #1. To be fair, Toronto Developer #1 did some work and repurposed some of the Plummer Memorial Hospital into condominiums. It is unfortunate that the initial sale contract did not include a no-sale clause, because the property was sold to Toronto Developer #2, and well, we all know how that turned out.

In a bid to extricate the City from a disastrous Toronto Developer #2 entanglement, the City of Sault Ste. Marie repurchased the Old Hospital Site for $4.75M; a lesson learned the hard way of not having iron-clad contracts and not being able to access federal or provincial TARP funding.

Again, because the City does not have the ability to acquire demolition funds from the federal or provincial government, another deal was struck with Toronto Developer #3 to demolish and redevelop the Old General Hospital and the waterfront property. I would certainly hope that the contract signed this time is absolutely iron-clad, because we sold the property for $1 and took a $2.75M loss on the deal.

As someone who has complained about this blighted, derelict site in many blog posts, I am concerned about it again because I just don’t think it is going to happen.

I am not concerned that the current developer will not tear the building down; I am concerned that it will be too expensive to build anything affordable in its place. The condominium market in Toronto has collapsed, so the idea that any condominiums will be built in its place here in the Sault is absolutely zero.

The cost of building a new single-family detached home is $800K, and new townhouses are selling for $500K in the Sault. So what would a brand new waterfront condominium cost in the Sault? The condominiums that were redeveloped by Toronto Developer #1 on the former Plummer Memorial site sold for approximately $350K to $500K, well before COVID and the subsequent price increases.

If new condominiums were to be built at the Old Hospital site, they would be the same price as Toronto, approximately $1,000 per square foot, $800K for a small two-bed, one bath condominium, plus at least $800 a month condominium fees, and a municipal tax of approximately $12,000 per year. This is hardly the price tag senior citizens in this City will pay for housing convenience.

The reality for the Sault is that there are two types of housing needed in our City: seniors’ affordable rental housing, who would like to move out of their large homes as they are over-housed, and the second massive housing need is social geared to income housing.

The City has waited for fifteen years to tear down the old General Hospital, but, just maybe, a good hard look at re-purposing what is there for senior and social housing rentals would be a good idea, because when it is gone, from a dollars and sense perspective, that site may never be rebuilt again.

Mark Menean, http://www.saultblog.com