[vid]

Every school in Thunder Bay that has been closed is now being re-used. The main uses are multi-use community centres and condominiums. Basically the only additions to our rental market are schools.

One former school is now the Boys and Girls club which rents out most of its space to over 30 organizations, the high school I went to is a business incubator with another 30 or more businesses in it, a high school down the street is now a law school. A nearby public school is going to become an office building for a local engineering company, employing over 120 people. The fact that we've run out of vacant schools to renovate means that we may very well start seeing new private sector office construction in this city. At this point I honestly can't think of any closed schools that don't have, at the very lease, solid plans for re-use. A lot of them have only a 50% occupancy rate, or so, but they are in use.

The flip side of this coin is, we have very few abandoned buildings period because so much of our heritage has been demolished in the past few years.