And where it’s not like that, we have built. Look at a map of the prairie provinces, for Pete’s sake.
Minneapolis is on a flat plain with top soil, similar to Winnipeg. Denver is on a flat plain with top soil - abutting mountains, in exactly the same way Calgary is. It is substantially a different case to these Crown lands that we are talking about. And take a look around Seattle - where there is the same topography as the kind that is hemming Vancouver in, no one lives there.
Well, I guess we’re stuck at the point where I think land worth can only really be determined by the market. If there was an experiment to release some Crown land and improve infrastructure in selected areas to try give private land prices a break, that would go a long way. I know Muffin said there’s a process where someone can apply for crown land, but that’s IMHO a poor substitute - god knows what kind of interests you’d be competing with behind the scenes. Or at least have a critical study into whether there is room for reform (Canadians love their public inquiries.)
I’m not sure what Minnesota is supposed to prove. Northern Minnesota looks a lot like northern Ontario. Cook County, Minnesota has a lower population density than the Thunder Bay District or the Algoma District.
Which brings us back to the fact that there is tons of available land to move to cheaply all across Canada, and people are not making that move. There’s gotta be a reason to do so beyond “it’s there”. I’ve presented numerous examples of them, but apparently one hour outside of Toronto is uninhabitable to you. I’d like to be there for the reaction to “hey guys, we’ve got land on the side of a mountain for you” or “Free land on James Bay!” by the average urban dweller.
The average urban dweller might ask questions like, Does it have electricity and water supplied? Where is the nearest school? Where is the nearest supermarket? Where is the nearest job?
There’s cheap land in Australia too, even in many country towns, where you might buy an existing house for about 20% of the price of a similar house in Sydney or Melbourne, but those towns are declining in population. Why? Basically, because there are no jobs in those towns.
“not worthless” FOR WHAT PURPOSE?
Land is not equally valuable for all purposes. A piece of land that has great mineral resources may have no other redeeming value, and certainly may not be suitable for residential or farming purposes. Would you be interested in buying a parcel of land that you could not live on, could not farm on, but was really good for digging a big hole in the ground?
You stated, “meanwhile 90% of the country is crown land that gets leased out to big companies.” Do you have a source for this statement? Do you know how much of the Crown Land is actually leased to any corporation today, or how much has ever been leased to anybody? I’m guessing that huge swathes of Canadian Crown Land have never been leased to anybody because nobody (no person and no corporation) has ever expressed the slightest interest in a lease. Do you have any facts or statistics that undermine my guess?
I was typing quickly and didn’t mean that all crown land is leased. I meant that 90% of the country is crown land, which may be leased.
As to the rest, I say let the market decide since otherwise we’re just playing amateur geologist to speculate on whether land is worthless or not. Maybe someone wants to be the next J.R. Ewing - why not let him/her buy what they want and the government can collect the property taxes anyway?
Huh? You gave some examples in the Maritimes that still seemed expensive for the location.
But whatever. I’m sure that all crown land was delineated with surgical precision by the government to carefully leave all the worthwhile land to ordinary citizens while selflessly keeping the worthless stuff for themselves and industry. (cough) I guess legalizing pot is a more worthwhile public discussion anyway.
Sorry, LC, but your conspiracy based anti-government bias is blinding you to the obvious geographic, economic and social facts. You have your opinions and are ignoring fundamental facts that do not fit your opinion. I suggest you start with the fundamental facts and take care to ensure that whatever opinion you come to is supported by those facts.
BTW, a person I dated lived on a commune in the bush north of Ignace, which included raising bees and goats. No problem re. Crown land at all. The problem was the black flies.
One reason would be that preparing land for sale is not free: just the expense of surveying and dividing land into tracts adds up quickly, even if you don’t ever find a buyer. Moreover, if the land sells for very very little, the amount you collect in property taxes isn’t going to pay for the record-keeping expenses, much less leave any monies available to pay for providing services (like roads!). Far-flung tracts that are not economically viable are a net drain on the public budget.
And the government has a really good idea of what lands are selling for and what lands are economically viable, because there are privately-owned tracts scattered around. When those tracts are not selling well, when $100-200/acre will buy our would-be JR as much land as he wants, it is very apparent that land availability is not constraining growth.
Suppose the government does dump the Crown Land on the open market. Look at the tracts for sale I linked to upthread, or others located on the same realty sites. Notice how many of them are adjacent to or near Crown Land. What do you think would happen if/when all of the adjacent Crown Land was available too? What do you think would happen to the property values of those existing private tracts? “Supply and demand” ring a bell? Demand is known to be pretty low; greatly increasing supply means prices plummet. Those people who already own tracts find out that their land is suddenly worth much much less, which means property taxes drop, which means the local government has less money to provide services, which makes the land less desirable–lather, rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, who does have the money to buy up huge tracts cheap? It’s not JR; it is corporations, foreign and domestic. If you can buy up thousands or millions of acres for pennies apiece, the annual carrying costs are negligible, and you can hold the land off the market for years or decades. Then if something changes (people suddenly find your neighborhood desirable, climate change means the locale is now livable, whatever), then Giant Corporation has an absolute lock and can enrich themselves at the expense of the public at large. For example, if the local municipality expands out and now wants to acquire the land for development, there’s no applying to have Crown Land transferred to the municipality; the town can and must pay whatever sum Giant Corporation wants to demand, and desirable land is now as expensive as it ever was in greater Toronto. Who wins here?
That’s a good one but hey, I’m just trying to make some sense of why real estate prices have been a uniformly destructive influence on the lives of people I’ve known (mostly in Southern Ontario.) Other than moaning the situation, I rarely hear anyone else in Canada even talking about it. I’m happy to be proven wrong about crown land but I don’t see anything wrong with having a questioning attitude to the conventional narrative.
People raise bees and goats in that area? :eek: But I thought, according to this thread, you fall off the edge of the world once you go a few hours north of Toronto. It’s all worthless, I tell you!
I live in the Vancouver. There are frequently articles in the local paper about how out of control local housing prices are and about how the government should do something about it. Sometimes, they even mention that Toronto and Calgary have the same problem.
I suspect that the reason that you don’t hear about other markets is that it’s viewed as a local problem with little national significance (which is kind of true because real property law is part of provincial jurisdiction).
How much Crown Land is even in southern Ontario? The links posted upthread suggest the amount is negligible, in which case the real estate prices in the area have nothing whatsoever to do with the Crown Land and everything to do with the fact that huge numbers of people all want to live in the same place.
Opening up Crown Land in northern Ontario will have ZERO effect on real estate prices in southern Ontario if everybody wants to live in southern Ontario.
So you’re admitting that Crown Land is inflating prices for the rest of us - that’s a start. But with all due respect, this sounds insane. You’re saying that driving people out of the area (to the GTA or other countries, I presume) actually creates a net benefit for the area. You’re saying that one person on an expensive estate is a better thing than fifty people each on cheap estates.
You can put controls on stuff like this through zoning, etc., as it’s done everywhere.
People end up in Southern Ontario because there are no other options provided in Canada!! And I’m not buying that it’s only because of the weather. As I said before: the GTA is not a paradise on earth and people wish there were other options.
Yes, we in Western Canada don’t exist. Good lord.
Sorry. Correction: “People end up in a few selected areas including Southern Ontario because there are no other options provided in Canada”
But here’s the thing - Western Canada is not full. Southern Ontario is not full. I keep going back to you being surprised that housing in a metro of 5M people is expensive. Have you looked at housing prices in NYC or LA or SF or dozens of other major metros in the US? Or London? Or Shanghai? Why do you think this is a uniquely Canadian problem?
People aren’t ending up in Southern Ontario because that’s where they can afford, good Lord. They end up there because that’s where jobs are, the economic powerhouse of Ontario is, and because that’s where it’s nice to live. Same for other cities. People end up in the GTA and Calgary and Vancouver because that’s where jobs and schools and people are. No one is clamoring to live in Red Lake because there’s no jobs there. Your fixation on Crown land being the problem is weird.
That’s exactly the thing - high prices don’t make sense in wide open places like Canada that could use more population. The state of Minnesota has more people than all of B.C., so why does all of BC need to be choked with Crown Land except for a few highly priced public areas?
I never said they go to Southern Ontario because it’s cheaper there. I meant that they are stuck going there (and dealing with the high prices) because it’s one of the few places that’s actually well developed.
Never heard of anything like this. Zoning typically controls what one can use land for, and does not require the owner to use it for anything. It would be a weird sort of “ownership” of land if the government could force you to sell it off cheap when it wants you to.