Monday, April 24, 2017

The Field of Gold - 5500 Daffodil Garden in Aurora

 
The Arboretum follows a green space from Wellington Street to St. John side road. It has pave and unpaved trails, lovely bridges and a large variety of flowers, trees and shrubs, and native species. It is home to butterflies, song birds and small mammals.

 Daffodil Garden is apparently 3 years old (2017) a beautiful initiative of volunteers from Aurora belonging to Aurora Community Arboretum


A large memorial daffodil garden .
October 29th 2017 an enthusiastic group of volunteers planted 1,000 daffodil bulbs in the Arboretum. This will bring a grand total of 5,500 daffodils in the Field of Gold.

The trail continues north and eventually joins the Tom Taylor trail in Newmarket. You can follow the Tom Taylor trail north beyond Green Lane to the Rogers Reservoir. 
 
The 100 acre park has other facilities such as playground for children and baseball diamonds and soccer fields. There is also a community center that has a gym, a pool and a hockey rink open all year round.
Like much of the land in York Region, this was forested land before the settlers came and actively farmed the area. The Aurora Community Arboretum aims to help restore some of that former forest grandeur.
 
The idea for the Aurora Arboretum began about 1995 and it was established in 1996. The primary focus of the individuals working on the project at that time was to plant caliper trees as memorials. These first plantings are located in the valley of the East Holland River, just west of the Aurora Town Hall. The planting of the memorial trees (as of 2007 called Commemorative Trees) is done under Adopt-a-Park Agreements with the Town of Aurora.
 
 A 200 years old healthy tree was cut April 2017. here is the result. These old trees should be protected even tough the carved sculpture is beautiful. That was a tree older that the town itself.
 
 
Links
 
http://www.auroraarboretum.ca/get-involved/commemorate
 

Friday, April 21, 2017

Ontario’s Housing Cooling Intentions in April 2017 means More Taxes and More Government Control and Targeting Real Estate Industry

The Ontario government on Thursday announced a series of measures, including a tax on foreign buyers and expanded rent control, aimed at curbing the city’s soaring real estate prices. Home prices in the Toronto region rose 6.2 percent in March, the biggest one-month gain on record, according to a benchmark price index by the Canadian Real Estate Association, and jumped almost 30 percent in the past 12 months.
The Ontario government on Thursday announced a series of measures, including a tax on foreign buyers and expanded rent control, aimed at curbing the city’s soaring real estate prices. Home prices in the Toronto region rose 6.2 percent in March, the biggest one-month gain on record, according to a benchmark price index by the Canadian Real Estate Association, and jumped almost 30 percent in the past 12 months.
Non-resident speculation tax
The center piece of Ontario’s new housing strategy is a 15-per-cent tax on home purchases by foreign buyers in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, from the Niagara region to Peterborough.
The measure, which resembles Vancouver’s foreign-buyers tax, will apply to most buyers who aren’t citizens or permanent residents, as well as foreign companies. It will take effect as of April 21, 2017.
About 8 per cent of home buyers in Greater Toronto are non-residents, according to the province.
Under the tax, non-residents will need to prove that they have a legitimate reason for buying property in Ontario that goes beyond investing. The tax is not aimed at new Canadians, according to Premier Kathleen Wynne. It will be reimbursed to buyers who become permanent residents within four years of a sale, and won’t apply to international students enrolled full-time for at least two years or someone who has been legally working in Ontario for at least one year. To qualify for a rebate, the property must also be considered someone’s principal residence.
“Most banks can’t survive a 50 percent drop in real estate values, It’s going to come down, and a lot of people are going to get hurt.”
Expanding rent control
Among the most controversial moves announced Thursday is a plan to bring all private rental apartments under the province’s rent-control regime, which currently only covers buildings completed before November, 1991. Rent hikes across the board will be held to around inflation, and capped at 2.5 per cent a year, although landlords can still apply for special increases if they do renovations or upgrades. Rents can be raised when a tenant moves out.
Expanded rent control could affect the condominium market. Many people buy condos with the thought of renting them out, hoping to sell or move in later. If what they can get from rent falls, they are less likely to buy in the first place and developers are less likely to build. So the result of expanding rent controls could be to reduce the supply of new housing. That is the very opposite of what a city in the grip of an affordability crunch needs.
New York brought in “temporary” rent control during the Second World War. It has stayed in place in various forms ever since, with a predictable outcome. As Mr. Tal puts it in his report, “Roughly half of the apartments in the city are under rent control, the other half is constantly under-supplied with a clear impact on prices.”
The result is a two-class housing system. Tenants hang on for decades to cheap, often crumbling rent-controlled apartments while everyone else scrambles to find a decent place.
Development charge rebate
In Toronto, development charges for new apartments can run up to $24,638 a unit. A $125-million, five-year program to rebate a portion of development charges aims to spur the construction of new apartment buildings. The government says it will work with municipalities to target projects where the need is greatest.
While developers welcome the rebate, some question its efficacy. Mr. Chalmers says any rebate helps, but he thinks the funding might be spread too thin. “It doesn’t seem like a ton of money to me over a province the size of Ontario.”
Vacant homes tax
The threat of dark condos downtown, or million-dollar-plus homes lying empty in the suburbs, has prompted widespread concern. The province is giving Toronto and certain other municipalities the required taxing power to target vacant homes.
Vancouver just brought in a similar tax, but it remains unclear what effect it will have.
Toronto officials are now studying utility data to come up with a more accurate number than a rough estimate of 65,000 of empty houses from census data.
Tax fairness for new apartment buildings
Tenant groups and landlords agree on few things, but one of them is that apartment buildings are taxed unfairly.
In Toronto, they pay a property tax rate around 2.7 times what a taxpayer with a comparable single-family home pays. Landlords pass those costs onto tenants.
Toronto’s tax ratio has come down slowly, but is not scheduled to achieve balance for several years. In some other municipalities, multi-residential buildings are taxed even more steeply. This year, the province froze tax rates on apartment buildings, mandating a zero-per-cent increase.
Provincial land for affordable housing
Sitting to the east of Toronto’s downtown core is a chunk of empty provincially owned land in the West Don Lands, near the Don River.
Mayor John Tory has been demanding Queen’s Park make the land, and other surplus government real estate like it, available for affordable housing.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Aurora Ontario History

The Aurora Site, also known as the "Old Fort," "Old Indian Fort," "Murphy Farm" or "Hill Fort" site, is a sixteenth-century Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on one of the headwater tributaries of the East Holland River on the north side of the Oak Ridges Moraine in present-day Whitchurch–Stouffville, approximately 30 kilometres north of Toronto.

This Huron ancestral village was located on 3.4 hectares (8.4 acres) of land and the settlement was fortified with multiple rows of palisades. The community arrived ca. 1550, likely moving en masse from the so-called Mantle Site located nine kilometres to the south-east in what is today urban Stouffville.

The Aurora/Old Fort site is located at the south-east corner of Kennedy Road and Vandorf Side Road, east of the hamlet of Vandorf in the town of Whitchurch–Stouffville. The Aurora site was occupied at the same time as the nearby Ratcliff site.

The Rouge River trail, used by the Huron and then later by the French to travel between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe / Georgian Bay, ran through the Aurora site.
"Perhaps the busiest and best documented of these routes was that which followed the Humber River valley northward ... although another trail of equal importance and antiquity and used earlier than the former by the French, extended from the mouth of the Rouge River northward to the headwaters of the Little Rouge and over the drainage divide to the East Branch of the Holland River at Holland Landing."

The Aurora/Old Fort site was indiscriminately looted by collectors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. An 1885 report on Whitchurch Township notes that two thousand interments took place on the site, and that another smaller burial site was found two hundred yards from the site beside a large pond.

The self-trained archaeologist William Brodie wrote two archaeological reports on his findings at the Old Fort site (1888; 1901) dating back to his first visit in 1846. In reference to the Old Fort site, Brodie wrote in 1901:
"To say that a ton of archaeological material was collected from the County of York sites, is a moderate estimate. Some of it is in European museums, some in the States, and some of it in Laval University, some of it is still in the hands of amateur collectors, and a little of it has been secured for the Provincial Museum, but the greater part of it, once in the keeping of private collectors, is gone, being collected and lost, as private collections often are."
A complete map of the site was produced in 1930 by the amateur archaeologist Peter Pringle.

The Aurora/Old Fort site was completely excavated in 1947 and 1957 by the University of Toronto. The 1947 dig was the first student excavation by the university, and it was led by John Norman Emerson. Emerson's doctoral work was largely based on the excavations of the Aurora/Old Fort site.

This excavation contributed to the conclusions of archeologists and anthropologists that the Wendat coalesced as a people in this area, rather than further east in the St. Lawrence River valley, as was thought at one time. Findings in the late twentieth century at the Ratcliff Site and in 2005 at the Mantle Site have provided more evidence of sixteenth-century settlements by ancestral Wendat in this region.

 From Aurora excavation 6 pictures (items) are available on internet.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

High Taxes in Aurora Ontario Canada

When visitors come to northern York Region, there isn’t a hotel or motel for them to stay at in Aurora.

Development charges, or DCs as they are commonly called, are the fees developers have to pay municipalities to fund growth-related costs such as roads, water and sewer pipes, transit and recreation facilities.
While DCs aren’t the only consideration when someone is looking to build a new hotel, York’s high fees are a significant reason why Aurora is having trouble attracting a new hotel.
Building a 90-unit hotel in Ajax would cost $831,000 in development charges, he said. In Toronto, it would cost $868,000, while in Milton, the fees would come to $1.2 million.
That same hotel in Aurora would costs $2.8 million in regional and town DCs.
Arguing the region does have a program that gives hotel developers small financial relief, regional chairperson Wayne Emmerson urged Councillors not to focus on one industry before the region reviews its entire development charges structure in June 2017.
The taxes for a commercial Property in Aurora of 1,975 Sq Ft are $6,250. This are outrageous high. This taxes are taken from MLS listings 2017
The taxes for land only 0.9 Acres in Aurora are Taxes:$6,624.58 This info is from a MLS listings 2017.
5.05 Acres in Aurora are taxed at $15,387.80 per year.
Isn't the government charging too much in your opinion? The services offer in exchange are not reflecting the high price of taxation. 

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Type of Estates

As English society evolved, the "incidents of tenure" (i.e., obligations to the lord) became regularized, and decreased over time. By the time Canada inherited British property law, the only incident of tenure left was "Escheat", that is, when a tenancy ends, the land reverts back to the lord. Even today, when someone dies without an heir, their land becomes property of the Crown (i.e., the government).
With the passage of the Tenures Abolition Act in 1660, although all land was still technically owned by the Crown, peasants could buy and sell their rights to the land they were living on, as well as pass it on by will or by gift. This type of property right became known as an "estate in free and common soccage" or a "free estate". This is why property rights over land are known as "real estate".
An "estate", in English medieval legal parlance, was an amount of time over which one held property rights. There are three types of estate: Fee simplefee tail and life estate.

Fee Simple

This is the most prevalent type of common law estate. It is what most people think of when they speak of "owning" land. Although the land is technically owned by the Crown, the holder of fee simple can use the land, exclude others from it, and dispose of it.
Under fee simple, the rights to land transfer automatically from the holder of the fee simple to his heir. The holder of the rights in fee simple can grant the land to someone other than his heir. In order to do this, he must use the phrase to [the new owner] and his heirs. Any other phraseology will not legally transfer fee simple by grant. It will instead be regarded as a "life estate" 

Life Estate

The other main type of estate is the life estate. Very simply, this means that someone holds the rights to the land for the duration of his life, after which it reverts back to the owner in fee simple or his heirs. For instance, an elderly landowner might remarry late in life. He may then wish to leave the estate to his new wife for the remainder of her life; when she dies, the land will revert to his heirs, rather than her heirs.
There is no particular phraseology required to grant a life estate. Something such as "to X for life" is usually sufficient. If the phrase "to X and his heirs" is not used, then the transfer is presumed to be a life estate.

Fee Tail

Fee tail is a rare estate, abolished in Canada everywhere except for Manitoba, in which only the lineal heir may inherit land. One can only transfer one's property rights in the land for as long as one lives; afterwards, the property rights revert to one's lineal descendents. This limits how land can be bought and sold, therefore reducing the value of the land.

Why is Land so Expensive in Canada?

Crown land, also known as royal domain or demesne, is a territorial area belonging to the monarch, who personifies the Crown. It is the equivalent of an entailed estate and passes with the monarchy, being inseparable from it. Today, in Commonwealth realms such as Canada and Australia, crown land is considered public land and is apart from the monarch's private estate.
In Britain, the hereditary revenues of Crown lands provided income for the monarch until the start of the reign of George III, when the profits from the Crown Estate were surrendered to the Parliament of Great Britain in return for a fixed civil list payment. The monarch retains the income from the Duchy of Lancaster.
Within Canada, Crown Land is a designated territorial area belonging to the Canadian Crown. Though the monarch owns all Crown Land in the country, it is divided in parallel with the "division" of the Crown among the federal and provincial jurisdictions, so that some lands within the provinces are administered by the relevant provincial Crown, whereas others are under the federal Crown. 
About 89% of Canada's land area (8,886,356 km²) is Crown Land: 41% is federal crown land and 48% is provincial crown land. 

The remaining 11% is privately owned. Most federal Crown Land is in the territories (Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon) and is administered by Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. Only 4% of land in the provinces is federally controlled, largely in the form of National Parks, Indian reserves, or Canadian Forces bases. In contrast, provinces hold much of their territory as provincial Crown Land, which may be held as Provincial Parks or wilderness.
Crown Land is the equivalent of an entailed estate that passes with the monarchy and cannot be alienated from it; thus, per constitutional convention, these lands cannot be unilaterally sold by the monarch, instead passing on to the next king or queen unless the sovereign is advised otherwise by the relevant ministers of the Crown. 
Crown Land provides the country and the provinces with the majority of their profits from natural resources, largely but not exclusively provincial, rented for logging and mineral exploration rights; revenues flow to the relevant government and may constitute a major income stream, such as in Alberta. Crown Land may also be rented by individuals wishing to build homes or cottages.

So only 11% of the land in Canada is privately owned.

Total area of Canada: 2,467 million acres Of this area 2,247 million acres is land and 220 million acres are fresh water. The Europa World Yearbook 2004 describes Canada’s land area as the second largest in the world, after Russia.
The ownership factor is 1. The Queen is the sole legal owner of all the land of Canada. The private “holdership” factor, based on freehold tenure of housing is 67%. For all other land it is less than 9.7%, with over 90% of Canadian land remaining as Crown leasehold, administered for the Crown by various agencies and departments of the government of Canada

All physical land in Canada is the property of the Crown, Queen Elisabeth 11. There is no provision in the Canada Act, or in the Constitution Act 1982 which amends it, for any Canadian to own any physical land in Canada. All that Canadians may hold, in conformity with medieval and feudal law, is “an interest in an estate in land in fee simple”. Land defined as ‘Crown land’ in Canada, and administered by the Federal Government and the Provinces, is merely land not ‘dedicated’ or assigned in freehold tenure. Freehold is tenure, not ownership. Freehold land is ‘held’ not ‘owned’.

Principal uses of land in Canada:
National Parks
There are 43 National Parks in Canada, which cover a total of 55,465,548 acres, or 2.2% of the total area of Canada.
Agriculture
Farms cover a total of 166,798,546 acres in Canada. There are a total of 246,923 farms, with an average size of 674.5 acres. 235,131 farms covering a total of 62,359,984 acres are privately held. The remainder, covering 104,438,561acres, are rented or leased from others.
Private homes
There are a total of 11,562,975 dwellings in Canada. Of these, 7,417,525 are held in freehold tenure by the resident homeowner. 64% of Canadians hold their own home. Mining
Mining companies operate in all Canadian provinces. The main minerals mined are gold, copper, zinc, lead, coal, oil and natural gas. Most mining land is leased, on Crown leases.
Forestry
Forest and All Other Wooded Land in Canada
Provincial Portion by Province:


Province


Forest Land Owned by Each Province in acres


Newfoundland/Labrador


48,967,807


Prince Edward Island


56,833


Nova Scotia


3,148,054


New Brunswick


7,373,464


Quebec


185,092,726


Ontario


153,412,035


Manitoba


84,681,170


Saskatchewan


53,936,988


Alberta


80,386,572


British Columbia


152,300,085


Yukon


55,782,825


Northwest Territories


79,996,154


Nunavut


2,320,269


Private land (Total/Industrial, Nonindustrial)


Total


Privately held Land in acres


Industrial


Nonindustrial


Other


Total


Newfoundland/Labrador


165,557


0


217,448


383,005


Prince Edward Island


0


0


610,337


610,337


Nova Scotia


2,293,088


5,011,188


7,304,276


New Brunswick


3,170,293


4,462,626


0


7,632,919


Quebec


2,720,571


20,165,831


2,471


22,870,873


Ontario


1,564,143


11,836,090


155,673


13,555,906


Manitoba


0


2,456,174


271,810


2,727,984


Saskatchewan


0


0


3,644,725


3,644,725


Alberta


0


2,641,499


37,065


2,678,564


British Columbia


0


4,398,380


0


4,398,380


Yukon


0


0


0


0


Northwest Territories


0


0


0


0


Nunavut


0


0


0


0

Forest companies often manage forests and engage in logging activities in a partnership with the government, rather than holding forest land in Canada. The government, or the public, actually holds the forest and simply leases it to various companies who do the logging and management in many cases.
Forest companies hold just over 1.5% of Canada’s wooded land.
The majority of Canada’s forest land, about 94%, is government owned and managed by provincial, territorial and federal governments. Only 6% of Canada’s forest lands is privately owned.

Prices go up when is scarcity of resource so when the land owned by the population is small people pay higher price for the land that is "held an interest in an estate in land in fee simple" not owned.

So in Ontario there are only 11,836,090 acres of non industrial land at a population of 13.6 million people so less than one acre per person is left per person.

Property purchased through freehold tenure may come with obligations imposed by governing bodies. Property taxes and maintenance and zoning costs may be the responsibility of the owner. The rights and obligations attached to the freehold tenure pass to the heirs of the owner upon death.

A transaction in which property is leased for use by one party with specified limitations on its use is a leasehold tenure. Leasehold tenure properties remain under the ownership of the original owner but allow the leaseholder certain rights pertaining to the property. Most leasehold tenure transactions have a specified expiration date upon which all rights to the property transfer back to the original owner. Leasehold tenure transactions may impose certain obligations on the leaseholder as specified under the contract.