There's a new vision to develop the top of Collegiate Hill, but this time there's a different developer and a project more than twice the size of earlier proposals for the site.
If approved by the city, the Sal-Dan Developments Ltd. proposal will consist of two nine-storey buildings at 22 MacDonald Ave. – the former Sault Collegiate Institute playing fields at the corner of MacDonald and Gladstone.
Sal-Dan wants to build a total of 232 new housing units there.
In 2019, developers Joe and Dave Ruscio and John Martella proposed putting a 12-storey, 90-unit building on the site.
That attracted opposition from neighbours.
Ruscio and Martella subsequently scaled back their proposal to an eight-storey building with 65 units.
That building was approved but it never materialized.
"Just recently, three or four months ago, we got involved in the property," Sal-Dan president Sam Biasucci tells SooToday.
"We were asked if we would work on the property and bring it forward. And that's how we're here."
"We will be applying to rezone the property from its current multiple unit designation to two 116-unit, nine-storey buildings for rental purpose or potential condominium development," Biasucci said in a letter sent to residents of the Collegiate Heights neighbourhood.
"The building will have two levels of underground indoor parking for 192 vehicles, 96 above-ground spaces, 18 barrier free spaces for a total of 288 on-site parking spaces," Biasucci said.
Sal-Dan Developments will unveil its plans for 22 MacDonald at a drop-in information session this Thursday, Jan. 16 in the lower-level parish hall at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church at 114 MacDonald Ave., from 5 to 6 p.m.
The rezoning application will be submitted "in the coming weeks" to city council, and members of the public will be allowed to express concerns at that time, Biasucci said.
"We think this is a very positive project. We approach one project at a time, as we always do to the best of intention, and take it to the finish line with the same intentions.
"This project is not different. We as a team think this is very, very nice. I think it will be a tremendous enhancement for the area," Biasucci told SooToday.
"If everybody's cool with it, hopefully it will go in the ground sometime in the early part of the summer."
The 2019 proposal didn't move forward, Biasucci said, because it was financially unfeasible.
"It got diluted and cut back and became financially unbuildable. A lot of people don't understand that, but if a project doesn't make sense financially, it cannot be built.
"If you don't have the mass to pay the cost of the development, then you fall flat because you can't pay the bills with it. You have to have a certain mass to be able to be successful."