A consortium of six homebuilders broke ground Sept. 18 on a 7,500-unit master-planned community on a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Prince Edward County, Ont., in what local officials are calling the municipality’s largest housing project ever.
Ontario Housing Minister Rob Flack attended the sod-turning ceremony for the development, known as Base31, on the site of the former RCAF Station Picton and No. 31 Bombing and Gunnery School, according to the Picton Gazette. The 750-acre property sits about two kilometres south of Picton and roughly 160 kilometres east of Toronto.
The project is being built by PEC Community Partners, a partnership of six companies that includes DECO Communities, Rockport Group, CaraCo, Paradise Developments, Fieldgate Homes and PEC Placemaking, the Gazette reported. The group bought the former airfield in December 2021 and has already converted about 70 acres of it into a market of shops, restaurants and event space that opened in stages starting in 2024.
The first phase, called Hilltop Village, includes 230 homes plus a 120-unit purpose-built rental building called The Landing, according to the Gazette. Real estate news outlet Storeys reported that ownership units in the first village will start at $299,900 and that the initial phase is expected to be finished within about two years, with the full build-out planned to unfold over 20 to 25 years.
Prince Edward County secured a provincial minister’s zoning order to speed approvals for the site, a tool the province says can cut roughly a year off conventional planning timelines. “An MZO is about speed, which also means lowering costs,” Flack said, according to the Gazette.
Five per cent of the roughly 7,500 planned homes will be designated affordable under Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation criteria, meaning housing that costs less than 30 per cent of a household’s before-tax income. Ten per cent of the units at The Landing rental building will also be set aside as affordable, Storeys and the Gazette both reported. The developers are partnering with Prince Edward Hastings Habitat for Humanity to build four townhouses on the site.
“These homes will both stop the exodus of young families” who are paying above-market rent or living in unsuitable conditions, Habitat for Humanity Hastings Prince Edward chief executive Hazzem Koudsi said, according to the Gazette.
Alexandra De Gasperis, vice-president of DECO Communities, said about 2,700 people registered interest in the project ahead of initial sales. “Six companies with one belief, that this place deserved something extraordinary,” she said, according to the Gazette.
The groundbreaking comes as new housing construction has been slowing in much of Ontario. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported this month that the national annual pace of housing starts edged lower in August, while the Canadian Real Estate Association’s Sept. 15 report showed the national average home price rose 0.6 per cent year over year to $668,219 in August, even as its benchmark price index remained down 3 per cent from a year earlier.
For a municipality of Prince Edward County’s size, a project planned to add thousands of homes over two to three decades represents a scale of development rarely attempted outside Canada’s largest metro areas, one that local officials and developers say is meant to serve everyone from young families to retirees rather than a single buyer segment.
Illustrative photos: the images in this article are stock photography meant to represent the type of housing and setting described, not photos of the Base31 site itself.
