Winnipeg housing project expands after rapid-transit plans unveiled

Winnipeg's Lord Roberts neighbourhood is set to undergo major redevelopment following the city's $138 million rapid-transit announcement on Monday.

Developer Andrew Marquess bought four hectares of scrubland around the Fort Rouge rail yards eight months ago, and planned to build between 1,000 and 1,200 housing units on it.

Now that the city has unveiled plans to run a rapid-transit corridor right past the land, Marquess says he'll expand his plans for the area.

"For the townhouse portion of it, the transit was a nice-to-have, but it allows us potentially to put some more density on there in the form of doing an extra concrete highrise tower, or maybe two," he said.

Jenny Gerbasi, city councillor for the area, said the person who previously owned the land decided to sell after the former mayor Glen Murray's rapid-transit plan was shelved nearly three years ago.

"It's very good news for urban infill development," she said.

Unaware of transit plans

Marquess said he is not receiving any grants from the city for the project, and he did not know the rapid-transit plan was going ahead when he purchased the land.

"It's an interesting piece of land in that, you know, it's in a great neighbourhood and it's really close to a lot of amenities. So for us, we were just fortunate to get that large of chunk of land just in its location," he said.

"The transit corridor is just something that's a really unique opportunity, to build something there that you could incorporate the transit in with your development."

He still has to consult with the neighbours and work his way through the city's planning process before construction can begin.He hopes to see shovels in the ground as early as next summer, starting at a dead-end on Morley Avenue.

"I would see us moving from north to south," he said. "I would see us doing the townhouses first, and then I would see us doing the concrete towers, which would probably be located on the south end of the site."

The city and the province announced Mondaythe agreement to build a $138-million rapid transit corridor connecting the city's downtown with the Fort Rouge neighbourhood.

The three-year project will build a dedicated bus lane from The Forks in downtown Winnipeg to Jubilee Avenue; maps on display at Monday's announcement showed potential stops on the bus line near Morley Avenue, Confusion Corner, Harkness Avenue and Union Station.

A second stage of the project would run from Jubilee Avenue to Bison Drive, near the University of Manitoba, officials said, although they offered no details about when that might happen or how it would be financed.