Saugeen Shores Council has agreed to declare a couple of Town owned lots surplus, with the goal of creating more land for housing.
At its meeting September 18th, council declared two of three lots staff had explored as possible parcels that could be sold, as surplus.
Mayor Luke Charbonneau says, “This is sort of step one of what’s likely to be a multi-step, multi-year process of looking at our lands and trying to optimize them for housing.”
The two lots are referred to as Sandy Acres and South Rankin. A third lot known as Deer Run was removed from consideration for the time being. Some councillors have expressed a desire to keep the Deer Run property for park land.
A staff report says last December, council heard a presentation from staff about a number of properties the Town might use to create housing opportunities, either through the sale of the public lands or some other use of them.
The idea would be to have the proceeds from the sale placed in the Town’s housing reserve.
Mayor Luke Charbonneau says, “It’s part of an ongoing effort to make sure the Town has affordable and attainable housing in our community. Part of that process was a report from our affordable housing task force, and one of the things they recommended was that we look at surplus lands that the Town owns that we could potentially sell and use the proceeds to advance our affordable housing initiatives.”
The Sandy Acres lot is in a newer subdivision area in the north end of Port Elgin. It had been kept as a possible road reserve, but staff say it’s no longer considered necessary.
The South Rankin Street property is in the north end of Southampton, near Foodland.
In both cases, the next steps would be to have the Town work with a lawyer to prepare the land for sale, pass the relevant bylaws, get an appraisal of the land and consider selling it.
Charbonneau says identifying appropriate lands is a long process. He adds, “We’ll have to make some further decisions after we’ve declared them surplus about proceeding to either sell them, or to use them for some other purpose, but the ultimate goal is to advance our affordable housing initiatives.”
The Town owns more than 700 parcels of land.
Councillors briefly discussed using Town lands to support Habitat for Humanity builds, though it appears there may be other lots being kept in mind for that purpose.
Charbonneau says, “These are just two properties that we’re looking at right now but the Town owns an awful lot of property and there are other ones that we’re looking at to either declare surplus or turn towards use for affordable housing.”