I just jumped into this discussion now, so forgive me if this has been brought up.
In western Canada, in particular British Columbia, there is no crown land for sale. It just cannot be purchased outright.
Why?
Because the native Indians have laid claim to every square inch of crown land in BC. And any company that wants to operate on crown land, i.e. extract resources, has to sit down with the local natives and hammer out deal. In other words, if you want to do business on “their” land, you have to pay up.
This issue of land claims has now taken a very serious turn. An Indian band near Kamloops has laid claim to privately owned/freehold land in an effort to either stop a mine from commencing or extract money from the mining company.
I’m not too familiar with native land claims in other parts of Canada, but in BC, it is making a lot of lawyers very rich.
Huh? Honestly confused - I never said anything about the government forcing people to sell land. I was just talking about allocating land for residential or whatever use.
It is indeed a complication to things, but the vast vast vast majority of B.C. has a topographical profile that looks like a stretched-out accordion. No one’s building a city on the side of a mountain.
Ok, you’re right, I surrender. There is no space left in B.C. where any human being should live. The government has already done a magnificent job allocating all the land they possibly could.
I’m saying no such thing. The lack of land is not what’s driving people out of northern Ontario; the lack of JOBS is, and the lack of other economic incentives is. There’s plenty of cheap land in northern Ontario; look at how many bungalows could be built on that 158-acre tract I linked earlier, for sale for only $22K. The number of people living in Timmins, Ontario, is constrained not by lack of housing but by lack of jobs. (The four largest employers in town outside the public sector are three gold mines and a Wal-Mart.)
I’m saying that property values would plummet because there aren’t a lot of prospective purchasers (the demand side of supply and demand). That means that right now you have one person on a cheapish (not expensive) estate, and afterwards you’d still have only one person, but now on a much cheaper estate. You will not end up with 50 people on any kind of estate until you have economic opportunities sufficient to lure them up there. That means jobs and schools and stores and services.
In the 19th century, that mostly meant agriculture. Today, there are a lot more economic opportunities, but they are concentrated in big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver.
Zoning controls what can be built–it doesn’t control who can own land. There are relatively few places in the world that have controls such that companies can’t own land, and such places tend to have very restrictive and slow-growing economies.
What kinds of other options are they looking for?
Answer: they’re mostly looking for places with lots of good jobs, easy access to hospitals and grocery stores and movie theaters, decent schools and opportunities for their kids, etc. Making Crown Land available cheap in northern Ontario doesn’t provide any of these features. Right now, at this very minute, all of these people in greater Toronto have the option of moving up to Timmins or Cochrane or Sudbury, all of which have housing substantially cheaper than in the GTA. Do you see lots of people taking advantage of these options now? No, you don’t.
I really don’t know where you’re going with some of these arguments which seem to be a mix of getting facts completely wrong and/or seeing an extraordinarily myopic one-sided view of them. This would be another example. If “real estate prices have been a uniformly destructive influence on the lives of people [you’ve] known”, then I suggest that the people you know are all in about their early 20s and just starting their first jobs. Because real estate prices have been a uniformly enriching influence on the lives of everyone I’ve known, sometimes to a remarkable degree. And these are not speculators, just ordinary people buying well-chosen homes as primary residences and staying in them for a decade or two or three. If you want to see an example of the destructive influence of real estate on people’s lives, here you go.
So you zone the land for residential use. XYZ Corporation buys the land. They, however, have no intention of building houses anytime soon; it’s just an asset held against the day when it makes economic sense to do something with it. In the meantime, it’s simply left vacant.
Does the government:
force XYZ Corp to build houses anyway, even if there’s no demand and the houses will sit vacant, unsold and unlet in perpetuity?
force XYZ Corp to sell the land to somebody else who will promise to build houses? (and how many ‘somebody elses’ can the land cycle through?)
allow XYZ Corp to hold the land off the market for years or decades, sitting empty?
not allow XYZ Corp to buy the land in the first place?
**Slash2k **pointed out the problem of large landholding companies getting a lock on large areas if it is open slather on Crown Land. The municipalities won’t be able to get it back.
You said this could be solved by zoning. As you say, zoning is just about allocating usage. So zoning won’t solve the problem. Unless that zoning permits municipalities to buy the land back cheap. Hence my comment.
Well, we’ve made progress from earlier in this thread where people insisted that high prices don’t exist. I guess I see your point, but if you think that spending all one’s disposable income on a mortgage payment instead of on their children’s education (or whatever) is a good thing, because of the payoff at the end of the tunnel, I’m afraid I disagree.
Why don’t some or all of these people you’ve known move to cheaper places outside of southern Ontario? Per this source, the average home in Toronto sells for $630K, but for a quarter of that price, they can buy in Fredericton, New Brunswick (average home price: $156K). If the GTA is so destructive, move to a cheaper place.
Please point out anybody on this thread who said that high prices don’t exist?
My argument, and that of most of the other posters, has been that high prices are not a result of the government’s Crown Land policies. That is an entirely different and wholly distinct argument.
Governments worldwide use tools at their disposal to strategically manage development - zoning, easements, limiting foreign investment, tax breaks to individuals, contractual agreements between towns and developers, etc., etc. I’m not an expert in real estate law so I can’t sit here and quote bulletproof example agreements to you.
None of these actually restrict a corporation from buying up and locking up large tracts of land. If you want to do that, then you can pass a law (or make it part of the purchase contract) that a buyer who doesn’t fulfill certain conditions within a time period has to sell the land cheaply, or not allow the corporation to buy it in the first place. In the former instance, you’ve basically created a new form of tenure that’s not really ownership; in the latter, you also have to create follow-on agreements that prevent corporations from buying the land from individuals later on. (Joe Blow buys 10,000 acres, sells it to XYZ Corp, buys 10,000 more acres, sells it to XYZ Corp, etc.) However, if you bar corporations from owning land, then you also have barred most development companies, thus defeating the purpose of putting the land into private ownership in the first place.
Most publicly held corporations (i.e. those not belonging mostly to one or two major shareholders) aren’t going to buy and landbank huge tracts of land. Corporations are about payoff, especially immediate gratification. Land lying fallow for the long term is not profitable. Buy land, build as soon as possible, sell individual houses - very profitable.
A richer person might buy an empty tract of land as an investment for retirement and hold it for 20 year, a corporation - most likely not. Plus, a company would be paying taxes on that land. If it’s land in an area where houses are going up all around, it’s market value and thus taxes would be increasing. Not as much as if it were full of houses, but still not taxed like a farm out in the boonies any more… especially if the city forces the issue by rezoning the land to make it even more valuable.
/twitch
May I interrupt this session of let’s-debunk-LC’s-conspiracy-theory-and-foreigners-keeping-us-little-folk-down to ask a question that relates to population density and distribution?
The positive relationship between a city’s size and its attraction as well as the costs of spreading out vs up have been mentioned. Have there been simulations or educated guesses as to what a city with few legal restrictions* and good access to land would end up looking like at various sizes?
Disk-shaped at low population, cone-shaped at the highest population and linearly interpolated in-between?
At what population level would the disadvantages of large cities start outweighing its advantages enough to halt its growth? Does that point exist or do cities have enough increasing marginal returns to outweigh the disadvantages of large size?
Yes, I’m aware that local idiosyncrasies** change the shape and size of particular cities. I’m asking in the same way that one might wonder about the behavior of current in a circuit made of perfect conductors and perfect resistors; isolating a variable to understand it so it can be layered on other understood variables.
*Think Hong Kong level of minimal meddling rather than Kowloon chaos.
**Like being on an island, hemmed in by mountains, mayoral clientelism toward rent seekers etc.
