Posted Jun 7, 2023, 7:05 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Hamilton
Posts: 12,731
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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/busi...roducing-port/
Quote:
Steelport reimagines Hamilton’s historic steel-producing port
Can the harbourfront in Hamilton that was once synonymous with making steel be transformed into a 21st-century industrial site that will bring new jobs? Two brothers who are developing Steelport industrial park think so.
Steelport covers the nearly 800 acres of historic – but underused – Stelco industrial land acquired by global investment firm Slate Asset Management.
“We grew up in the area and we understand what redeveloping the site means for the city, as well as [for] the entire region,” says Blair Welch, who, along with his brother, Brady Welch, founded Slate, which is headquartered in Toronto and has 13 offices in Canada, the United States, Britain and Europe.
Slate recently submitted its application to the City of Hamilton for a massive development project it calls “Industry Reimagined.”
Slate plans to develop up to 12 million square feet of Hamilton waterfront that was home to the century-old steelmaker Stelco, which at its height in the early 1980s employed 26,000 workers.
Its master plan aims to take advantage of the site’s railway, road and port connections to build a modern, intermodal neighbourhood that’s primarily industrial with some commercial and recreational amenities.
The goal is to develop parcels of land that can flexibly accommodate a wider range of industries and supporting facilities than the area has been known for until now.
Stelco filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and was acquired by U.S. Steel. Today, the Hamilton steel site has about 750 workers and does not produce any steel – the factory processes steel made elsewhere into giant sheets and sends it to carmakers and producers of agriculture and infrastructure equipment. The Hamilton facility also turns coal into coke, an ingredient of steel shipped offsite for production.
The steel-rolling operations will continue under a sale-and-leaseback arrangement with Stelco, which sold the entire area to Slate last year for $518-million. Brady Welch says the plan includes phasing out the coking facility, which produces the smokestack flares and fumes that travellers see along the nearby Burlington Bay Skyway.
“We’ll be taking the coking offline. We know what we have to clean up on the site,” he says.
The brothers project their “reimagining” to create 23,000 new jobs. They point to a study by consulting firm Ernst & Young predicting that the redevelopment will inject as much as $3.8-billion into Ontario’s economy over the next decade.
Slate hopes to see industrial tenants start to lease properties on the site within a year, though they expect it will take about 10 years to completely clean up and redevelop the area, and longer for all of the construction and detailed landscaping to be complete.
They expect to attract companies that manufacture or assemble products as well as intermodal logistics and shipping firms that can take advantage of the area’s multiple transportation and service connections.
“The site has more than three kilometres of waterfront, rail hookups and excellent access to power. It’s unusual, maybe unique, to have all this infrastructure already in place at an industrial site on the Great Lakes,” Brady Welch says.
An industrial site of this size is a valuable commodity right now in Southern Ontario, says Marc Kirshenbaum, an executive vice-president and sales representative at Colliers Canada in Toronto.
“The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area [GTHA] is the fourth-largest industrial area in North America, and the main issue for us is that we have not built enough [industrial] product to sustain the demand,” Mr. Kirshenbaum says.
“We only have 13.8 million square feet [of industrial space] under construction, which is really nominal and has led to low vacancy,” he explains. “Industrial vacancies in the area are about 1.1 per cent. This low vacancy rate has led to [industrial] rental rates increasing more than 20 per cent per year.”
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