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With the value of residential construction in Windsor reaching unprecedented heights, the city has exceeded its housing target for this year, clinching millions in grant funding.
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens on Friday announced the city has recorded 1,179 housing starts as of mid-September, eclipsing its 1083-unit goal for 2024 set by Queen’s Park.
As a result, Windsor will receive $3.48 million from Ontario’s Building Faster Fund early next year, plus nearly $700,000 in bonus funding if it reaches 110 per cent of its target (about a dozen more housing starts) by the end of December.
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“Hitting that milestone is really exciting,” Dilkens told reporters.
The funding will contribute to “incremental improvements,” like infrastructure expansion, that will enable future housing development in Windsor.
“Although it’s not a huge amount in the context of our overall budget, it helps us move the needle forward in a positive way,” he said.
The city missed out on $3.4 million from the Building Faster Fund last year when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation — a Crown corporation that monitors housing development, among other things — asserted Windsor had only 346 housing starts in 2023, prompting confusion at city hall. The city believed foundations had been poured for far more units than CMHC recorded.
Jelena Payne, the city’s commissioner of economic development, said the counting issue arose when the city changed one of its software systems. Building permit information was not being automatically reported to CMHC, as it had been before the software change.
Now, the city has a team to monitor housing data, Payne said. It collects information about building permits and planning approvals, and sends numbers to CMHC for comparison at the end of each month.
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“Our inspectors have to go out anyway and inspect foundations and footings,” Payne said. “We do as part of the regular course of business.
“CMHC has a very thorough process where they actually go out and have to visually inspect the foundations and footings of every development prior to counting it and recording it.
“We check ours, they check theirs, and then we work together to make sure that all the information is accounted for.”
The city has issued building permits for nearly 1,300 new residential units this year, and has granted planning approvals for an additional 2,024 units.
The total value of construction linked to permits issued in 2024 is around $301 million, the city said.
Although the planning process is provincially legislated, Dilkens said, the city does have control over the speed at which it reviews processes, development applications and building permits. Expediting that process has been a “goal” in Windsor, and council agreed to hire about 25 more staff last year using $1.7 million from Ontario’s Streamline Development Approval Fund to make it happen.
“Now we start seeing the progress of the rubber hitting the road on all fronts,” Dilkens said. “It’s great to see that we have met that target.”
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