July 15, 2025
A pair of affordable housing buildings have risen from the rubble of the former City Motor Hotel in east Hamilton and are ready to welcome residents.
The six-storey CityHousing buildings at the Queenston Road traffic circle bring 82 new units into the mix as Hamilton struggles through an affordability crisis.
“It’s a new story for this site; it’s a story about the future that we’re all building together,” Mayor Andrea Horwath told a crowd gathered for a ribbon-cutting event Monday.
In 2013, the city expropriated the site and demolished the troubled City Motor Hotel before the municipal housing provider picked it up in 2018.
Now, the buildings — 55 Queenston Rd. and 1620 Main St. E. — offer deeply affordable rent-geared-to-income apartments and moderately affordable units in energy-efficient designs along Hamilton’s future LRT line.
The $27.5-million Queenston building will also have a YWCA Hamilton-operated child-care centre with 26 licensed spaces on its ground floor.
The $25-million Main East block is one of the first multi-residential mass-timber “passive house” buildings in North America, CityHousing says.
Two new addresses
55 Queenston Rd.
40 units: 25 one-bedroom, 15 three-bedroom, 20 per cent barrier free
Half are rent-geared-to-income and the others are half of market rent
$27.5-million project: CityHousing ($17.4 million), federal affordable housing fund ($3 million), loan through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation ($1.7 million), still-to-be-announced ($5.4 million)
1620 Main St. E.
42 units: 38 one-bedroom, four two-bedroom, 20 per cent barrier free
All are rent-geared-to-income (RGI)
$25-million project: CityHousing ($7.9 million), federal rapid housing funding ($10.89 million), City of Hamilton ($6.3 million)
Their completion is a “significant milestone,” CEO Adam Sweedland said, noting their apartments are among 264 new units CityHousing has built in the past two-and-a-half years.
But one major project, Jamesville, a vacant 91-unit townhouse complex on James Street North that’s to be redeveloped into a denser, mixed-income community, is stuck in its planning stages.
CN Rail’s appeal to the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) in 2022 has delayed the more-than-decade-long plan over potential “conflicts” with its bayfront shunting yard.
To help break the OLT impasse, the provincial government is considering a minister’s zoning order (MZO) at the request of CityHousing with council’s support.
An MZO is a provincial tool that allows the government to unilaterally regulate land use for development and override other municipal or tribunal decisions.
On Friday, the province posted the proposal for a one-month public commenting period on its environmental registry, inviting feedback ahead of an MZO decision.
“It is the option of last resort if we’re actually going to get this thing to move forward,” Horwath told The Spectator.
CN, in an emailed response, said it has “systematically tried to find a compromise solution” and noted it was “disappointed” in the MZO request.
In addition to its big-ticket capital projects, CityHousing, which has 7,142 units and more than 13,000 residents, has focused on addressing a repair backlog and reducing its vacancy rate to two per cent.
More than 6,000 households await subsidized apartments in Hamilton and shelters are at capacity, with roughly 1,600 people experiencing homelessness.
The landscape has housing providers looking to the new federal Liberal government to deliver on its election pledge to double Canada’s rate of residential construction to 500,000 homes per year.
During Monday’s event, new Liberal MP Aslam Rana praised 264 built units and said “hopefully, we will double this number” next year.
Horwath thanked the Hamilton Centre MP for being there “and for making some commitments that we’ll be holding you to.”
Metrolinx, which is building the LRT, plans to use land it owns next to the former City Motor Hotel property to stage construction.
Whatever space the provincial transportation agency doesn’t need should be made available for more affordable housing, Karl Andrus, executive director of the Hamilton Community Benefits Network.
“I would like to see the province donating that land so we could build more and higher buildings like this to deal with the housing crisis that’s around us.”