General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

Rule 1 of real estate: if you want security of tenure, own your property.

Also have it in a jurisdiction where wealthy, politically-connected developers can’t just get the city to declare your area “derelict” and take it away well under true value. But that’s a whole other issue…

Somewhere specific in mind?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._Ci...New_London

Oddly, Antonin Scalia was on the side of the angels and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was … not. Surprising/disappointing.

And I just remembered the word I meant was “blighted”.

My impression is that in general Canada is much better for this. It is still possible the government can decide that this particular block absolutely needs to be turned into a park or public square (I’m looking at you, Dundas Square!), but in general expropriations are done for legitimate infrastructure projects. Even in the past when we still bulldozed poor neighbourhoods, they were either turned into public housing (Regent Park in Toronto) or City Hall (Toronto), or the place just sat for decades (Lebreton Flats in Ottawa). It seems that generally we don’t just turn the expropriated property over to a developer to make tons of money for themselves.