(10-18-2025, 08:40 AM)ZEBuilder Wrote: It may take 15 years but they'll still be built, so for now sure it's smoke but it takes a while for things to come to fruition when it's a developer in it for the long run.
I find this particularly frustrating. For a bit under 14 million, I could buy those two existing historic residential buildings at 46 College. I could also buy 44 Weber for a little over 3 million, not to mention lots of other properties/parcels downtown. I could pull some strings, kick everyone out, tear the buildings down and then let the property fill up with trash and invasive weeds for 35+ years or as long as I wanted. I could even propose a project, but then secretly never actually commit to doing it for as long as I lived. There'd be almost nothing anyone could do to make me do something useful with the land I bought.
But obviously that is a huge waste. If there was a way to only authorize the sale of property in urban cores (edit: I should add, or approve developments), within transit station catchment areas or other places that can objectively be deemed as suitable for necessary development if there was an "immediate" plan to develop it after purchase, then that could be helpful. But I don't really know how well we could legislate etc any rules that would push property buyers or developers into actually developing what could be deemed as "high value" properties. Then you'd introduce issues of whether or not it's a good thing to actually grant a government control over that when citizens (or developers) should be free to buy land as they wish.