A lot of 4,695 square feet. Smaller than plenty of suburban house lots in Charleswood.
Under the right corridor zoning, it can hold 52 apartments and zero parking stalls.
That is not a variance, a rezoning, or a three-year fight at community committee. On select Winnipeg corridors it is as-of-right.
Most developers are still pricing these lots as retail
Walk Portage or Pembina and you will pass dozens of tired single-storey commercial buildings on small lots. They trade on retail income, retail cap rates, and retail comps.
Since January 31, 2025, a lot of them are not retail sites anymore. They are multi-family development sites that happen to have a store on them.
The market has not fully caught up. That gap is the opportunity.
What changed
City Council approved amendments on December 12, 2024, and they took effect January 31, 2025. They allow residential development as-of-right on select mall and corridor sites carrying the Malls and Corridors Planned Development Overlay (PDO-1).
Three things matter more than the rest:
- No density maximum for residential development in the PDO-1
- Parking minimums eliminated on some stretches of Portage Avenue and Pembina Highway
- Residential permitted as-of-right, rather than through rezoning
Remove the density cap and the parking requirement from the same site and the arithmetic changes completely.
Why parking is the real unlock
Height gets the headlines. Parking is what actually kills small corridor projects.
On a narrow lot, required parking does not simply cost money. It consumes the site:
- Surface stalls eat the footprint you wanted to build on
- Underground parking on a small plate carries brutal cost per stall
- A drive aisle and ramp need width a narrow lot does not have
This is why small corridor lots sat undeveloped for decades. The math never closed. Remove the parking requirement and sites that were structurally impossible become buildable.
Height follows the street
Corridor height limits are not uniform across the city. On the site we reviewed, the permitted height was tied to the width of the right-of-way it fronts — a wide arterial supported substantially more building than a narrow street would.
The practical lesson: two similar lots on different streets are not equivalent, and you cannot eyeball the difference from a listing. Confirm the ceiling for your specific parcel rather than assuming a neighbouring site’s number carries over. Confirm it against the City’s Malls and Corridors information and the zoning by-law for the specific parcel.
Establishing the envelope is the first step of any large multi-family project we take on — before drawings, before budget, before anyone signs anything.
A real corridor site, by the numbers
We recently completed a zoning review on a corridor site we are evaluating. The site details are confidential, but the numbers are instructive.
The site:
- 4,695 sq ft total, roughly 3,385 sq ft usable
- Zoned C2, Urban Infill Area 1, Mature Communities
- Malls and Corridors PDO-1, Urban Mixed Use Corridor
- Buildable footprint roughly 35 feet wide by 95 feet deep
What the zoning permits:
- 80% site coverage
- No parking required
- No minimum lot size, and no minimum lot area per dwelling unit
- Ground floor commercial required, minimum 14 feet to the underside of the finished ceiling
- Front yard 2 feet, stepping back to 12 feet for any storey with residential windows facing the lot line
Two viable schemes came out of it:
- Option 1 — ground floor commercial plus 4 storeys, 4 units per floor: 16 units at 677 sq ft
- Option 2 — ground floor commercial plus 13 storeys, 4 units per floor: 52 units at 677 sq ft
Same dirt. Same purchase price. A 36-unit difference, decided entirely by what the envelope permits and how far you choose to take it. Testing both options is design work, and it costs a fraction of what it costs to discover the ceiling after closing.
The narrow-lot tower is the new form
A 13-storey building on a 35-foot-wide lot is not a shape Winnipeg has much of. It is common in Vancouver and Toronto, where land scarcity forced it decades ago.
It comes with real constraints worth knowing before you buy:
- Small floor plates mean the elevator and stair core eats a large share of each floor
- Construction staging on a lot with no yard needs planning from day one
- Above a certain height, structure and life-safety systems step up in cost
- The commercial ground floor is required, so you are a mixed-use landlord whether you planned to be or not
None of these are dealbreakers. All of them are cheaper to solve on paper than in the field. That last one is worth planning for early: the ground floor still needs to be built out for a commercial tenant, and the building still needs managing once it is standing.
"If it is as-of-right, why is nobody building?"
Three reasons, and all three favour whoever moves first:
- The rules are new. January 2025 is recent, and most owners have not re-examined what their land permits.
- The form is unfamiliar. Local builders have limited experience with narrow-lot mid-rise, so it gets priced as risk.
- The lots look small. A 4,700 sq ft site does not read as a 52-unit building until someone runs the envelope.
Every one of those closes over the next few years.
How to evaluate a corridor lot
- Confirm the parcel actually carries the Malls and Corridors PDO-1, not just a commercial zone
- Confirm whether parking minimums are eliminated on that specific stretch
- Check the right-of-way width, which drives the height ceiling
- Measure the buildable envelope after setbacks, not the lot area
- Test at least two massing options, because the spread between them is enormous
- Only then build the pro forma
Verify all of it against the Winnipeg Zoning By-law for the specific parcel. Corridor rules vary block to block, and the difference between two addresses on the same street can be dozens of units. Once the envelope is settled, construction management is what keeps the pro forma intact through delivery.
Own a building on Portage or Pembina? Send us the address and we will tell you what it permits today — density, height, and whether parking still applies. Most owners are surprised. Get in touch with Summit
Keep reading
Corridor sites are one half of what changed in Winnipeg. The residential infill rules changed too:
- Winnipeg Infill Construction: By-Law 59/2025 Costs in 2026 — real cost per door for duplex, triplex and 4-plex builds
- How to Fast-Track Your Fourplex Build — the permitting path under the new infill zoning