City may start tearing down decrepit vacant commercial building ‘eyesores’
Blighted, abandoned commercial buildings may soon start disappearing around Windsor.
An administration report going to council Monday recommends changing the bylaw to allow the city to tear down non-residential structures. Currently, the city can only demolish abandoned residential buildings.
“Some vacant buildings get to the point where they’re just a blight in the neighbourhood and they’re bringing down property values,” Dan Lunardi, the city’s deputy chief building official who wrote the report going to council, said Tuesday. “We receive numerous complaints.
“After a while it’s pretty obvious that the best thing would be to tear them down for the sake of the entire neighbourhood and the city.”
The issue was first outlined in the 2010 Report on Blight. Councillors Jo-Anne Gignac and John Elliott both more recently asked administration what could be done to tackle commercial dumps left to rot in city neighbourhoods.
“At some point we have to speed up the process for the worst ones,” Elliott said. “They pose a health and safety danger, No. 1. And they’re unsightly. Someone potentially moving into a community and sees that, they would say no. “They’re just eyesores.” Expanded demolition powers must be approved by council first. But if the idea gets the go-ahead, don’t expect big abandoned factories to start disappearing. Building officials only mean to target low-risk, low-cost demolitions for smaller commercial structures.
“It would be very costly to tear down large factories,” said John Revell, the city’s chief building official. “We don’t want to engage the city in money-losing propositions. We don’t want to spend a lot of money that we can’t recoup.”
The city typically spends between $4,000 to $6,000 to demolish vacant residential buildings — and has torn down about 90 of them in recent years. Revell said the city would not want to spend much more to tear down individual commercial buildings.
When the city demolishes decrepit buildings, the property often becomes more attractive to buyers and sells for a higher price. The city recoups its money one of two ways. Sometimes, the city adds the cost of demolition to the owner’s tax bill. Or if the property owner has defaulted on back taxes the city sells the property and recoups its money through the land sale.
Also, building officials don’t want to tackle anything with environmental problems, such as gas stations with underground tanks, or facilities with contaminated soil.
“We have to be very careful with environmental issues,” Revell said. “Once the city starts engaging in demolitions, then we become responsible for the environmental issues that should remain with property owners. We don’t want to engage in any risky demolitions.”
The goal is to improve the look of neighbourhoods, not industrial parks, which do not typically draw as many complaints about disrepair.
“We’re looking at blighted buildings that are adjacent to residential areas,” Revell said. “Blighted buildings in industrial areas don’t necessarily pose an issue until they become a public safety concern.”