Six years ago the number was $40 million. Now it’s $90 million. Same building. Same site. Same 192 beds.

That’s the story behind Banwell Gardens Care Centre, the long-term care home planned for Banwell Road just south of Tecumseh Road East in Windsor. Preliminary work is underway and full construction is close, but the project’s cost more than doubled while everyone waited for shovels to hit the ground. If you want a real-world lesson in what six years of delay does to a construction budget, this is it.

What Happened with the Banwell Gardens Care Centre Cost

Officials with the facility confirmed the current price tag sits at $90 million, up from the original 2020 estimate of $40 million. That’s a $50 million increase on a project that hasn’t changed in scope. The design is the same. The bed count is the same. What changed is the cost of building it.

Residents were originally supposed to move in back in 2023. In September of that year, officials were still hopeful construction would start in 2024. Now, in the summer of 2026, groundwork is just getting underway, and the new opening estimate is summer 2028. That’s a five-year gap between the original move-in date and the revised one, and it lines up almost exactly with the cost increase.

Why Windsor Long-Term Care Construction Costs Doubled

Officials point to two main pressures. First, COVID-era supply chain disruptions drove up material costs across the board, and those effects lingered longer than most people expected. Second, and this is the part that matters most locally, Windsor and Toronto were both running large-scale construction projects at the same time, competing for the same materials and the same skilled trades. When two major markets need the same lumber, the same steel, and the same electricians, prices move.

Add in the approvals process itself. Officials say the redevelopment required multiple levels of sign-off, and that process simply took longer than anyone budgeted for. Every month of delay is a month where labour and materials keep getting more expensive. It’s not one bad decision that got Banwell Gardens to $90 million. It’s a stack of ordinary pressures that compounded over years.

What Stays the Same: 192 Beds and Six Resident Home Areas

Here’s the part worth knowing if you follow Windsor-Essex development closely. Despite the cost jump, the design hasn’t been scaled back. The new home will still offer 192 resident spaces across six Resident Home Areas, mixing private and shared rooms. Each home area gets its own dining room, spa room, lounge, and recreation space. Nobody trimmed the project to make the new number work. They just absorbed the increase.

What This Means for Windsor-Essex Real Estate and Investors

I bring projects like this up because they tell you something about the broader Windsor-Essex market that a listing sheet never will. A $50 million cost increase on a single institutional build is a direct read on what’s happening to construction costs across the region right now. If a long-term care operator with years of planning and a fixed design still saw prices double, that same pressure is sitting underneath every multifamily project, every commercial build, and every renovation quote you’re getting today.

This doesn’t mean home prices spike next month. It means replacement cost, the number that tells you what it would actually cost to rebuild an existing property from scratch, keeps climbing in this market. That gap between replacement cost and resale price is one of the quieter signals investors watch. When it widens, existing buildings start looking more attractive relative to new construction, because building new just got more expensive again.

Banwell Gardens will get built. The beds are needed and the funding clearly followed the design through every delay. But the six-year journey from $40 million to $90 million is a pretty clean case study in what patience costs in this market, whether you’re building a care home or planning your next project in Windsor-Essex.

If you know someone who’d find this useful, a neighbour, a client, someone who follows local development or is sitting on a project of their own, send this their way. Numbers like this only mean something when people actually see them.