This reminds me of that bit in Asteroid City: selling tiny plots of dessert out of a vending machine that have no infrastructure.
Politis said more than 3,000 calls have come in from individuals and companies interested in the program. In addition to discounted land, buyers will also receive property tax relief.
The town has a settlement area of up to 1,500 eligible lots.
The goal is to have development companies build a majority amount of the housing needed to accommodate the town’s growth plans.
So for the low price of $15,000 a corporation can own a substantial part of a Canadian town. And the town wants a corporation to buy and develop housing. So they want to turn part of their town into rent-seeking corporate homes?
They’re just trying to catch up to the rest of the province. People are starting to worry they might never have a local oligarch.
The scariest part is that the last time I was up there (admittedly some time ago), the total population of Cochrane was around 5000. Never mind the infrastructure for the lots, they’re going to have to entice a new grocery store into town if even half of them get built on. And I hope they’ve got an agreement with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine to send them some doctors. And that they’ve expanded the Internet bandwidth available for remote work by considerable, because there aren’t very many jobs up there either. (Nor is Cochrane the first to try this. Another nearby town sold lots off really cheap a few years back. I don’t think they got much out of it.)
As for why they’re doing this . . . most Northern Ontario communities have been slowly but steadily losing population for the last quarter-century or more, because the towns have very little to recommend them unless junior hockey or snowmobiling is a central part of your life. (I grew up in the area, so I know.) This is a stupid publicity stunt to try to push the population up again. The one thing every municipality in the area has lots of is land.
