I have purchased a lot of inner city homes and the only way to deal with each of these homes has been demolition. What happens is these small, old, nasty and barely habitable shacks end up in the landfill. That is a sad loss of what was once raw natural resource manufactured into building product. However the homes are not saveable for so many reasons, reasons which are well documented in other discussions. A possible pitfall of making the types of purchase decision that I need to make at the speed I need to make them is you could land on some sort of black swan property. That’d be some historic designation or land use rule that won’t allow you to demolish the house on site. That is a real potential home builders nightmare to get stuck drastically over paying for a land deal where you can’t build anything on the land. In the case of a recent land purchase, the lot in question was located in a direct control zone which is a complicating factor. Studying the zone it was noted the older homes were identified as potential ‘character’ homes and there were rules in place to incentivize preservation. I felt the rules were not that well crafted. For example in the rowhouse zone you can’t save the existing old building which is centred on the heart of the buildable area. Regardless I bought this house anyway and pursued a ruling from the city on the character status. This was received today so we have the go ahead for some serious design work.
Character or just old. The interior lacks character to put it politely. I’ve declared the house to be condemned. It will come down soon.