Stonewall to developers: Why not build on Main Street?

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This article was published 14/12/2020 (1805 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stonewall Mayor Clive Hinds is hoping a new incentive for residential property developers will bring new life to his town’s Main Street, the commercial and municipal soul of the community.

“The first place anyone goes in a small town is Main Street,” said Hinds, who was elected in 2018. The mile-long street has the town hall, a number of important commercial businesses, the bank, and the historic post office, he said. What it was missing, he and his council recognized, was space for people to live.

“We realized if we lit up the downtown, made it more attractive and booming, it would help not only local business, but Stonewall itself to be more attractive to those who live here or want to move here,” Hinds said.

So on Dec. 2, the town council passed a policy establishing what it calls the Heart of Our Town (HOT) incentive, an economic development strategy which aims to entice real estate developers to create residential units like condos or townhouses in Stonewall’s commercial general zone. It’s intended to run between 2021 and 2023.

The program will provide developers a potential $5,000 incentive per unit built in a building with five or more units in it, and Stonewall CAO Wally Melnyk said such developments are desperately needed in the town of 5,016.

“With the council looking for ways to reinvigorate and create a vibrant downtown core, one of the main ideas that came to the forefront was the need for people,” Melnyk said.

Currently, Melnyk said there are probably between six and 12 residential units in the zone the HOT initiative, which he calls “HOTI,” is targeting. A single successful project would thereby increase the area’s available units by between 50 and 100 per cent.

Melnyk said it’s become apparent that although many people still do want to have the traditional single-family home, the fact that Stonewall lacked new, smaller scale residential ownership opportunities was hurting its appeal factor.

For a small town about 25 kilometres north of Winnipeg, that has far-reaching effects: local businesses lose out to box stores within an hour’s drive, businesses have added difficulty in recruiting employees, and overall, it creates a gap in affordability for people who’d like to own property but aren’t eager to purchase a home requiring upkeep and labour.

And, by diversifying the residential mix and expanding residential opportunities, Melnyk said the town will expand the tax base for the community, pumping more money into Stonewall’s coffers than the incentive offered. “But it isn’t just about tax dollars,” he said.

Hinds added that the town had an annual growth rate of about 3 per cent in the first decade and a half of the 2000s, but in recent years, that’s slowed to 1.5 per cent or so as other areas south of the Perimeter such as Steinbach and Niverville have experienced growth.

“We realized we need to pick it up,” he said.

During a pandemic that’s had a tremendous impact on local business and the town’s bottom line, that growth will pay immediate dividends, he said.

“This program gets the ball rolling,” said Hinds, who anticipates that the current strong real estate climate — solid incentives for housing developments, low interest rates enticing buyers to come into the market, boomers looking to downsize — will make the HOT incentive a hot commodity.

Last year, the town had some success with its Spruce program, an incentivized program designed to boost rental availability: a 33-unit rental property came as a result. The town’s rental availability, a provincial study showed, had decreased by about a third since the early 1990s.

Melnyk said there’s already been interest in taking advantage of the HOT incentive from local commercial business operators who’re considering retrofitting or building new properties on downtown lots, and with at least two developers looking to build projects with between 20 and 24 units.

“It’s exactly the type of investment we’ve been lacking and we’re excited for someone to have the same vision as we do,” Melnyk said.

The town purposefully didn’t include criteria for potential projects aside from the number of units so as to not limit the type of proposals they might get from a more narrowly defined directive.

“We didn’t want to preclude anybody from coming forward with a proposal,” Melnyk said.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca