General Road and Highway Discussion

[MidTowner]

What you might do is make it irrational to let a (potentially) productive property sit fallow. In the case of downtown Kitchener, having a way to calculate the potential value of a property and factoring that into the taxes for that property would pressure the property owner to do something with it, to either get off the pot or... do the other thing. It would help speed up development of open parking lots and reduce the incentive to demolish underused buildings for tax savings.

(It might have negative second-order effects though. Someone wants to build a development that's high value? Might see opposition from all the neighbours who are afraid of it showing how they're underutilizing their own properties.)

Anyway, could this apply to Preston Springs? It's harder to justify that this property has a productive use than something in a downtown core. If you try too hard, all you do is make a property valueless because it's so encumbered by obligation. It's like having a brownfield requiring cleanup: it's not worth buying even for 1 dollar because you have to invest millions before you can do anything with it.

So much for the stick. What about some carrots?

Properties are assessed in Ontario based on the highest and best use of the land, if the highest and best use is not the current use. So, if someone owns a single family home on a parcel of land on a commercial corridor, it might be tempting to call him names and assume he is speculating while paying relatively little taxes, but the land portion of his assessment will be based on the highest and best use of the parcel, and will be a lot higher than someone with a comparable property elsewhere.

But I know that you're saying to levy taxes based on the potential value of a potential building or use on any given site. That could get really complicated for an assessor. We now have twenty story buildings in downtown Kitchener, for instance- does that imply that a given lot of a certain size in downtown Kitchener could accommodate a building like that? Maybe it could, but not all of them can. If you decided to assess based on the potential value of a piece of land, you would have endless appeals for property owners explaining why the market would not bear such a development, or why their particular lot is not suited to such and such development.

We do have carrots like grants for heritage properties, and development fee waivers in certain areas.

To bring this back to the topic, I think that Building Scout is right that the road configuration is what is holding back reuse of the hotel.