'Building legacy' — Windsor selects $16.8M townhouse project for downtown parking lot
Windsor has selected a $16.8-million townhouse project with affordable units for an underused city-owned parking lot downtown.
Developer 531 Pelissier Group will construct 48 residential units in three-storey townhomes on the lot between Wyandotte Street West and Elliott Street West. It’s a plan that city council chose over others submitted through the city’s Housing Solutions Made for Windsor strategy.
The development group, which includes BK Cornerstone Design Build, Philip Fernandes Designs, and Reality ONE Group Iconic, will build 32 two-bedroom townhome suites with single-car garages, eight accessible one-bedroom suites, and eight affordable one-bedroom suites.
“This is exactly the type of housing that our strategy was designed to deliver: attainable, inclusive, and built in a way that fits the character of this community,” said Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens during the project’s announcement on Wednesday.
“We generate very little revenue from parking on this space. For us, it’s not really a big loss. We’d rather have the revenue on the property tax side, knowing that there’s affordable housing being created, more bodies living downtown,” he told reporters.
The city will sell the property to the development group for $950,000, what officials call the market rate.
During the parking lot announcement, Brent Klundert, president of BK Cornerstone Design Build, held up a decade-old copy of the Windsor Star with a photo of his father, Ben, on the front page. In 2016, the elder Klundert praised city council for waiving development fees downtown.
