Windsor blight hits 400 properties, community group reports

Windsor is home to more than 400 vacant lots, properties and buildings, many on some of its busiest streets and in its iconic neighbourhoods.

'We're going to have a city that's just a doughnut. With a hole in the middle'

CBC News Posted: Feb 23, 2016 7:00 AM EST | Last Updated: February 23, 2016

400 vacancies

9 years ago

1:36

Windsor has about 400 vacant lots, buildings and homes. We took a tour of Pelisser and Oulette with Bob Taylor, a local activist hoping to awaken the people of Windsor to how big a problem it is.

Windsor is home to 400 vacant lots, properties and buildings, many on some of its busiest streets and in its iconic neighbourhoods.

Blight is everywhere.

In the past few years major retailers like Target, Sobey's and Jysk have either closed or moved locations, leaving large commercial structures empty.

Kathryn Tisdale created the 'Windsor's Vacant Buildings and Lots' webpage to raise awareness of how much vacant space Windsor has.

Windsor's blight being documented by online group

"The obvious discovery for me is it's so much worse that I thought," Tisdale said.

Radio-Canada put together a map with the 400 vacancies found so far. More than 100 are residential properties owned by the Canadian Transit Companyin the Indian Road neighbourhood in the city's west end.

Tisdale said this is a painful project for her. She was born and raised in Windsor and does not like what has become of the city.

"If we don't stop what we're doing and stop building around the edges of our city, we're going to leave a big hole in the middle," Tisdale said."We're going to have a city that's just a doughnut. With no downtown at all."

Bob Taylor takes photographs for the website. He said he wants people to see how bad it really is.

"We're not taking care of our vacant buildings," Taylor said.

'Windsor's Vacant Lots and Buildings' has photographed 400 empty locations in the city. (CBC)

CBC spoke with Thom Hunt, the city planner outside of the heritage Walker Power Building on Devonshire Road.

The four-story building has sat for many years without being developed.

Hunt said someone currently owns the building.

"From our standpoint we don't mind a vacant building as long as we see in the future it will be used and we hope the economy will improve to where the point the building is still standing and well maintained and be able to be rehabilitated and reused," said Hunt.

He could not answer what it meant to be well maintained.

Boarded up homes are not uncommon in some neighbourhoods, including the west end. (CBC)

"What you tend to see is a bit of a population shift that's occurring within the city," Hunt said."Areas that historically have had population in the core for office spaceare moving out to the periphery of the city, to the areassort of farther away from the core and even into the suburbs."

"Our neighbouring municipalities have actually gained population that way," he said.

There is a community development plan in the works looking into how to repurpose buildings and bring back a population base.

"In this area we keep sprawling, and sprawling, and sprawling ...using more and more farmland and we're basically treating all this land like it has no value,"Tisdale said.

With files from Radio-Canada's Edith Drouin

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Windsor blight hits 400 properties, community group reports

'We're going to have a city that's just a doughnut. With a hole in the middle'

400 vacancies

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