Toronto couple built an addition to house without permits told to tear it down.
- Thread starter james t kirk
- Start date
This one's looking good at him. I would hazard a guess that the overwhelming majority of us in Toronto want people to follow the building codes. We don't REALLY want what will happen if people don't.
Now if he'll leave the bullet ban alone...
His greatest masterpiece was "lets fine people waiting in lineups at clubs in the entertainment district" to reduce overcrowding, and to discourage people from coming downtown to party and having a good time.
He was serious too
But lets be honest, he got this one right by accident
But your comment about your "friends who live in areas with the same type of people from the same certain country living there and let me tell you, they think our system is a fucking joke." is factual. Like I said, I've lived in the neighbourhood since the 70s and witnessed additions without permits. There's a house, a dozen houses north of mine, he's Italian, been in the neighbourhood as long as I can remember. He built a 2 story addition without a permit back in the 80s.
Last year I did some minor repairs for a friend of one of my siblings. They just bought a house on Manning. It was a completely renovated by the homeowner, he was Portuguese. They converted the house into a duplex with a basement apartment. It's easy to tell that there weren't any permits for the reno. No self closing fire rate doors. No integrated carbon monoxide/smoke detector. Only one means of egress in the basement so it couldnt be used as an apartment. No fire rated drywall on the ceilings of the unit. Use of abs for plumbing. I know the owner was portuguese because there was a problem with the water heater and he sent his friend to fix the problem and we started talking while we waited for the tank to heat up.
Last year I did some minor repairs for a friend of one of my siblings. They just bought a house on Manning. It was a completely renovated by the homeowner, he was Portuguese. They converted the house into a duplex with a basement apartment. It's easy to tell that there weren't any permits for the reno. No self closing fire rate doors. No integrated carbon monoxide/smoke detector. Only one means of egress in the basement so it couldnt be used as an apartment. No fire rated drywall on the ceilings of the unit. Use of abs for plumbing. I know the owner was portuguese because there was a problem with the water heater and he sent his friend to fix the problem and we started talking while we waited for the tank to heat up.
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In order to do the inspections properly they'd have to pretty much gut it anyways. No inspector is going to sign off on something that was built knowingly without permits especially given the press it's received.
they would pick that place clean and find everything wrong with it they could because it has so much press on it. it is getting torn down regardless.
Paying the original permit fee plus the entire legal bills of the City would be a decent start for the fine. But that's just what it would have cost them to be legal from the start, plus what it cost us to keep saying, "NO. You have to go by the same laws as everyone else", you'd have to add some punishment amount for breaking the law as well. But considering they'd already owe us $510K it could be quite small.
However, they should NOT be allowed to keep the part of the addition that exceeds the legal length. We can maybe allow people to buy their way outta the paperwork they made by not getting a permit. But they should NOT be allowed to buy their way around the law that clearly said, "Thou shalt NOT build past that line". If we do we might as well let anyone build anything anywhere.
What's fucked up is people coming to live in a dense part of a big city who imagine that they can do exactly that. And who spend eight years ignoring and fighting everyone who tells them the law says they cannot. No understanding, no common-sense and demanding compassion from everyone else while they say 'fuck 'em' and take advantage.
We don't want that attitude to win; that's why we insist they and everyone else stick to the law.
In case you didn't know it, your property is always on a perpetual 999 year lease from the queen, who received the right to distribute it from God. This is the justification to treat property different from air and water
I wouldn't know if the 999 yr thing is true, but a moment's thought (Aspirin can dull the pain) will help us all realize that in a crowd of folks like a city, 'ownership' means only that your neighbours have all agreed to leave you alone—sorta, more or less—on a given patch of ground. We're all way too close together for 'anything goes' to be the rule on 'your' property, even if we all feel a genetic nostalgia for the olden days, back on the savannah when the nearest neighbour was a bonobo family in an acacia tree on the horizon, and 'what was ours was ours'.
If you expect everyone else to play by the rules and leave you the untroubled master of your land, then you'd better play their game, by their rules. The planning, zoning and permitting process these folks ignored, flouted, then foolishly and expensively dragged the City through is actually pretty accommodating and reasonable, and for all it's bureaucratic fussiness it tends to favour change.
These folks just wouldn't listen.
If you expect everyone else to play by the rules and leave you the untroubled master of your land, then you'd better play their game, by their rules. The planning, zoning and permitting process these folks ignored, flouted, then foolishly and expensively dragged the City through is actually pretty accommodating and reasonable, and for all it's bureaucratic fussiness it tends to favour change.
These folks just wouldn't listen.
It's not a 999 year lease, though it is in some senses like a lease. More properly, your claim to the land is a feudal tenure, "fee simple", meaning you have obligations to the Crown (e.g., property tax) in exchange for certain rights to use the land. But things like mineral rights, etc., are generally not part of the usage covered by your fee unless you also bought those separately. In Canada, some native land claims may have the status of being allodial land, meaning, land held independent of any obligation to the Crown. The rest of us own our land "fee simple". Fee because it's feudal, simple because they did away with all the complex conditions, you just pay your tax.
Looking into what the alternatives to fee simple used to be, there were lots. A sergeanty meant you got the land in exchange for providing a particular service to the king, like maintaining a bridge, or this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimp_tenure
Pimp tenure! Your right to the land was in exchange for providing whores for the king or his army!!
Update: Since their previous appeal to the OMB worked out so well for them, the Tsengs are appealing -- again -- in an effort to avoid complying with the law as she is writ:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/cit...ly-appeals-again-to-omb-to-save-home-addition
From the photos they are clearly insomniac, starved and living on only water. I only hope Ms. Tseng can continue to find the will to live...
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/cit...ly-appeals-again-to-omb-to-save-home-addition
From the photos they are clearly insomniac, starved and living on only water. I only hope Ms. Tseng can continue to find the will to live...
Thats how they do it in the US. And if the fine isnt paid within 1 week it goes up another $50K.
And then the week after that another $50K. And so on, and so on.
You wanna see how fast they drop this thing and pay their fine??
