Windsor Jail among surplus properties put up for sale by provincial government

Huge land parcels, historic buildings and even a radio transmitter are among the Southwestern Ontario properties the provincial government is unloading as it speeds up the sale of surplus assets in the face of a $15-billion budget shortfall.

The 243 properties provincewide — some already on the market and others already sold — include parcels that make up the former London Psychiatric Hospital site, plus the sprawling former St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital site and shutdown jails in three cities across the region, including Windsor and Chatham, and a former youth detention centre in Goderich.

The Windsor Jail site has loomed large recently with the city needing the site’s parking lot for visitors to the nearby city-owned Mackenzie Hall and possibly the jail’s 1877 registry building, but not the financial burden of the 1925 jail. But provincial officials have said they won’t split up the property. A government-owned radio transmitter in Chatham is also among the sites.

The property sell-off, totalling about 5,900 hectares (14,600 acres), is expected to bring in up to $135 million over four years and save the province nearly $10 million a year, the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services said. “Ontario currently has hundreds of vacant surplus properties across the province, costing the government millions of tax dollars a year to maintain,” Government and Consumer Services Minister Bill Walker said in a statement. The province said its streamlined plan to sell off surplus property will reduce red tape and “more easily identify which properties could be used for affordable housing and long-term-care projects.” Some of the sites listed on the inventory of properties for sale or soon to be once appraised are already on the market, including the former psychiatric hospital in London and its lands totalling about 65 hectares.

That site, commercially listed for sale at $694,000, has been held out as a potential home for future infill housing. At least one other Southwestern Ontario site on the list, the historic former Chatham courthouse and jail, was recently sold for $1 million.

Closed in 2014, the jail was completed in 1850. One of the men who worked on it, stone mason Alexander Mackenzie, went on to become prime minister.

Also included among the properties for sale is the Ontario agriculture ministry’s Woodstock office building.

George Kerhoulas, a sales representative in London with Cushman and Wakefield who’s been in the commercial real estate business for more than 30 years, described the sale of lands such as the former psychiatric hospital site in London as an incredible opportunity.

“What a rare and unique opportunity to have all that land compiled in one spot in the centre of the city,” he said.

And that property in particular has so much potential, Kerhoulas added.

“You can do a lot of good out there, whether it’s commercial, residential, high-density, lowdensity, maybe some industrial uses. It’s just unlimited out there, in my opinion.”