Every morning, I drive down the Niagara Parkway, past Nicholls Marine, and think about Frank Sobotka. Even though Sobotka isn’t a real person (just one of the many characters in The Wire) he dropped a lot of memorable lines. My favourite one being when he opined that, “We used to make stuff in this country, build stuff. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”
I think about Sobotka’s observation whenever I see Nicholls Marine, because the property has sat empty for six years, with no end in sight to its sorry state of abandonment. It wasn’t always that way though. For 62 years, Nicholls Marine was a staple along the Fort Erie waterfront, selling boats and boating supplies. But in 2018, as real estate prices started going bananas, the owners decided to cash out and sell the prime waterfront real estate.
Like it always does in these situations, the rumour mill started grinding away at full speed. As I was the local newspaper guy at the time, people would come to me constantly with things they heard from their brother’s buddy’s soccer coach who definitely knew a guy, who heard from a guy, who had the scoop on what was going on.
It’s going to be a fancy waterfront condo; it’s going to be a sleek restaurant; the Town actually purchased it to make a new riverside park; a wealthy BitCoin trader bought it and is building a massive riverfront mansion. And on and on.
People would ask me all the time if I knew what was going on with the property, to which I would always confidently reply: nothing.
I would tell people it’s not going to be a condo, it’s not going to be a restaurant, it’s going to be precisely nothing, and remain precisely nothing, for a very long time. And as usual, I was right.
Because – and this is a problem right across Niagara – there is too much profit in doing nothing. Time was, if you owned real estate, you had to do something with it to turn a profit. You had to build stuff. Not anymore.
Nowadays, the only thing you need to make money off a chunk of land, is time. Just some time, that’s all. At the rate that Niagara land appreciates in value, all you gotta do is buy some property, wait, then sell it again. A two-step trip to Profit Town.
That’s how I knew, all the way back in 2018, that Nicholls Marine wasn’t going to actually turn into anything
That’s how I knew, all the way back in 2018, that Nicholls Marine wasn’t going to actually turn into anything. From the day it sold and well into the foreseeable future, this chunk of land is simply going to be a money-printing machine for rich dudes. The guy who first bought it is going to sell it for a profit to another guy, who is going to do equally nothing for a few years before selling it for another hefty profit to another guy, who will also do diddly squat before selling it for profit to some other guy; and so on and so forth.
Even pretending to develop property has turned into its own robust industry. Lots of “developers” purchase property, go through the rezoning process, get draft approvals for subdivisions, all that jazz, but they never had any intention of actually building stuff. Building stuff takes work. It’s easier to just pretend you’re going to build something, only to then sell the property before you have to do the hard part.
That’s why so much housing “stock” is actually just speculative housing tied up in the imaginary phase. I’ve watched countless town hall meetings where “draft approved” subdivisions come back over and over for years, the developer always seeking another timeline extension. Not because the developer is scrambling to build the homes, but because the draft approved plan and property is on the seller’s block, looking for a buyer who will likely just resell it a few years down the line to another pretend developer.
All this silliness prompted the provincial government to propose new “use it or lose it” legislation last month, aimed at cutting down on all the faux development. According to the province, a survey of just seven Ontario municipalities found that 70,000 housing units have been languishing in this fake development phase for more than two years. The new legislation would allow municipalities stuck in this cycle to re-allocate water and wastewater servicing away from the fake developments and put it towards projects that are actually being built.
That’s a good start, but the province needs to go further and start adding a transaction tax to properties that are zoned for housing and keep getting flipped without any actual houses being built. And each time it gets sold without progress, the tax goes up even higher.
It’s not a perfect solution, and it wouldn’t fix problems like what’s going on with the aforementioned former Nicholls Marine property, but that doesn’t matter because I heard from a reliable source (my daughter’s daycare teacher’s uncle) that the old Nicholls Marine is being turned into waterfront boat dock for a Saudi prince to store all his jet-skis.
James Culic wasted all his money buying a real house so he has a place to live, instead of investing in imaginary houses like a smart person. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or tell us about the proposed subdivision that’s been “coming soon” in your neighborhood for the past decade in a letter to the editor.
