Longueuil mall rots while owner ignores fines
The Globe & Mail has a piece on a dead mall in Longueuil whose owner sits back and lets it rot while the urban area needs that kind of land for housing. But the sanctity of private ownership is paramount.
Chris 23:40 on 2025-01-05 Permalink
Let us know when you come up with a better system than private ownership. Many have tried, many have failed. It’s not perfect of course, and for that we have expropriation rules, which could be used here perhaps (as the article says). Or, someone could just pay him an amount where he wouldn’t say no.
Nicholas 01:13 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
Land value tax would fix this (unironically).
steph 07:59 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
“thousands of dollars in fines for violations of urban-planning rules and fire safety bylaws, which the owner ignores “. You can just “ignore” those?
dhomas 09:28 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
@steph The article says that the fines are all being contested. It could take years for those fines to work their way through the courts. Since the owner does pay their property taxes, the city is quite powerless here. If they had defaulted on the property taxes, the city could auction off the land.
From the tax records, this particular property hasn’t increased in value all too much from 2009, when the current owner purchased it, until 2024. Only about 15% increase in value over 15 years. In 2025, it is set to increase to 15.5M, which would be a 40% increase since the purchase. It might be a good time for the owner to sell now as it would likely be difficult to leverage the equity in a dead mall. Hindsight is 20/20, but the city should have probably purchased the land themselves back in 2009, if they wanted to develop it.
Ian 18:19 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
I’m with Nicholas on this, speculators are parasites. Punitive taxes are a win-win.
Chris 23:57 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
Sure, LVT is great and all, but it’s still atop of private ownership.
Ian 00:08 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
Unless you’re suggesting collective ownership at scale I’m not sure what the alternative would be. What are you proposing?
MarcG 12:03 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
I smell a strawman. Kate didn’t suggest the abolishment of private property she simply stated that we value it too highly and that it leads to problems.
Ian 18:44 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
To clarify, I was talking specifically to Chris’s point.
That said, I agree that this is one of those “if you don’t like this law I guess you want chaos” debate scenarios. Not so much a straw man as a false equivalncy, but still a bad faith argument.
There are lots of property reform approaches that are more equitable than doing, say, literally nothing. Ownership should and does incur responsibilities. Private ownership is not some kind of anti-society armour for property holders.
Orr 23:05 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
The fetishization of private property and relatedly, trespassing laws, has more than a whiff of the feudal era when property owners have rights the rest of us don’t have and we are subject to their rule more than they are subject to democratic rule. See also: we are “subjects” under a monarchy, not citizens in a republic.
Chris 00:29 on 2025-01-08 Permalink
>What are you proposing?
Not sure who you’re asking what exactly, but if that was to me, I’m not proposing anything. I’m basically asking Kate that very question, in response to her oft-repeated denigration of private property: what is she proposing that’s better than private property? Of course people have tried for centuries to answer this.
>Ownership should and does incur responsibilities. Private ownership is not some kind of anti-society armour for property holders.
Which of course is why the article discusses fines and expropriation, which our system has.