The Shannondale (née Electrohome, 152 Shanley St) | 8 fl | U/C

[zanate]

Interesting idea, to expropriate the factory for some sort of public work. But that means you've got a public work project to put there. So instead of not getting the city's owed tax money back, now the city has to spend money to rehab it and come up with something we may not need to build on it? Ouch. Not something I want on my tax bill.

Also this is not the only site like this in Kitchener.

I heard some interesting things recently about a contaminated site behind the UW School of Pharmacy which is apparently owned by a company called PolyOne. Apparently, the owner would be entirely happy to have the property assumed by the city, but then the city would have a property that can't be used without remediation, and the city would lose the tax income from it.

I did a little digging and this property is assessed at $1.7M, so it should tell you something that the owner is willing to let it be assumed. It's also a property at the heart of a construction boom, but there's nothing going with it that I'm aware of. The company lists this property as a "remediation property"-- one of dozens it has, by the way.

So, Electrohome is not the only unsellable property in the region, and creative reuse can't deal with it all. Some of these properties are just going to sit fallow until the economic viability of rehabilitating them exceeds the cost to do so, and the public purse can't bail us out of the sins of our past.