(12-09-2021, 10:34 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(12-09-2021, 08:15 PM)panamaniac Wrote: The Toronto Islanders do not own the land their houses sit on. Perhaps that provides an option.
I mean, they're on a 99 year land lease...while I'm sure there are technical differences, I'm not sure there are practical differences. While you live there, you can act as though you own the land I assume?
It’s a massively regulated situation. While technically they own their houses, due to the way the land lease is managed it’s really not what one normally thinks of as ownership. Lots of interesting information about how the process works:
https://torontoisland.org/purchasers-list/
Bottom line, while some lucky people do indeed get to occupy prime real estate for very little, it is in no way a solution to housing affordability. If the actual goal were solely housing affordability, the thing to do would be to rent the island homes for top dollar and use the money to build cheap apartment blocks on the mainland.
Edit: I found an article about a situation I had been considering mentioning but couldn’t remember many of the details:
https://torontolife.com/city/toronto-isl...ty-battle/
When I first heard of this, my immediate reaction was that the adoption was obviously a sham. When I read the article, though, I quickly realized it is not a sham, and agree with the Court’s ruling. At the same time, however, the acrimony mentioned in the article around various issues is all attributable to an attempt to have property trade for a value that is different from market value: you can’t stop prices from rising (or falling); only change how they do it.