Derek Baldwin
Published Jan 18, 2023
New owners of the northern portion of the former Ben Bleecker property are entirely within their right to sell a section of the former taxpayer-held property for sale to another developer, according to a senior Belleville city official.

The Intelligencer has fielded concerns from West Hill residents asking whether there were any restrictive covenants placed by the city on the original sale of the Ben Bleecker property once owned by taxpayers.

City council heard at a January 2021 public meeting that Dashmesh Properties Ltd., made a conditional offer of $800,000 — or $200,000 per acre — for the northern parcel to the city.

The sale was finalized March 21, 2022.

Dashmesh Properties also owns the Arabella Retirement Living residence recently constructed on Dundas Street West near the Moira River.

A representative of the developer declined comment Wednesday when reached by The Intelligencer.

The northern parcel is bounded by Sidney Street, Catherine Street and Yeomans Street and the southern portion of the former full Ben Bleecker property.

In 2021, city council gave the preliminary green light to build a 10-storey apartment building fronting Sidney and 37 townhouse units on the property pending several holding provisions such as environmental and traffic studies needed before final approval by the city.

Spencer Hutchison, senior associate planner of RFA Planning, represented the owner at the Jan 3 Planning Advisory Committee this year.

He said consent application was approved by the city May 19, 2022, by the city for a revised Dashmesh Properties application to sever the full property into two parcels pending further municipal approvals for the site.

The application asked for consent from the city to sever and rezone the property into two parcels in a new application in which Dashmesh Properties would retain the smaller western portion to build the 10-storey apartment building and then offer to sell the east end of the parcel to another developer.

Severing the property would spread the economic investment needed to complete the large residential project between two developers, said Hutchison, in his presentation requesting the committee for rezoning of both parcels.

“By severing the properties, it will expedite development of the subject land, one developer can focus on the apartment building, the other developer can focus on the townhouses. Otherwise you would really need a developer with deep pockets to do a 10-storey apartment building and 37 townhouses at one go,” Hutchison said at the time.

The committee forwarded the matter to a future planning meeting for consideration.

Meanwhile, according to a property listing posted October of last year by Joseph Shunock, a real estate broker who is retained by the City of Belleville for the sale of surplus municipal lands, the severed portion of the land intended for 37 townhouses was advertised for a price of $2.9 million or $2.1 million more than the original price of the entire north Ben Bleecker property.

The property was advertised by Ekort Realty’s Shunock as 40 Yeomans Street, a “2.45-acre site in the heart of commerce and residential activity.”

Shunock said the property listing has been removed from the market for the time being as owners await the outcome of their rezoning request to the city for the severance proposal.

He said residential development of the said Ben Bleecker property is a good-news story given it will bring new property tax revenues for city taxpayers versus lying dormant as surplus municipal lands.

“These surplus lands which are now generating tax for the city [paid by the new owner], even in their current form, is a good thing because they’ve gotten rid of assets that were producing nothing other than cost like the Ben Bleecker and others that we’ve sold over the years,” Shunock said in a phone conversation Wednesday.

Belleville city clerk Matt MacDonald told The Intelligencer in an interview that unlike industrial property sales by the city — which require restrictive covenants and time limits to build — residential sales by the city do not require such stipulations generally.

“Covenants you are thinking about are generally provisions that we put in agreements related to industrial land sales. In industrial parks, those are heavily restricted as it relates to a) can’t flip and b) development has to start within a specific amount of time,” MacDonald said.

By contrast, for residential sales, MacDonald said, “there is nothing in the Municipal Act that would preclude them (the owners) from selling property that they had purchased from the municipality.”

“From our perspective, again, we have no operational requirement for that property so we are selling it. Our obligation is to publicly sell it so we certainly can’t sole source sell it to someone without publicly offering it for sale so we sold it to the highest bidder through a public process which is what we are obliged to do,” MacDonald said.

“Once it’s out of our hands, it is privately owned and they can do with it as they wish,” he said.

Selling city-owned residentially designated lands that serve no obvious purpose help buoy city coffers with new revenues.

The city, he said, could put a covenant on non-industrial lands but it would make the sale of municipal properties more difficult given purchasers would not likely welcome buying properties that come with city imposed conditions.

“If we were selling a residential building lot and we put those restrictive convenants on property, I’m sure that you can anticipate that it would reduce the pool of potential purchasers if we were erecting what you could and could not do and when you could and could not do it,” MacDonald said.