A Kensington Market homeowner says she’s tired of the “stampede” of rats that takes over Ellen Avenue behind her property almost nightly, and she wants the city to start cleaning up the roadway.
But there’s a problem: The city says it doesn’t own the property, and no one seems to know who does.
“It’s filthy,” said Cristina Enrietti, who owns three houses adjacent to Ellen Avenue. “There are needles, garbage lying around, rats — some during the day, but at night there’s a stampede back there.”
Ellen Avenue is just one of the city’s so-called orphan properties — streets and laneways that have been left to deteriorate because they are more than a hundred years old and no longer have any living owner.
CBC Toronto has determined that Ellen Avenue last changed hands in 1898. But the last owner died in 1922, and since then, the roadway that runs north off Oxford Street, near College and Spadina, and then bends to the west, has had no known owners.
The neighbourhood’s city councillor, Dianne Saxe, says she’s looking into the issue, and although she sympathizes with the homeowners, there is little the city can do at the moment.
“It isn’t owned by the city,” she said. “We don’t have the right to tromp onto private property.”
Local historian Adam Wynne, who has carried out an inventory of orphaned properties throughout Kensington, says there are likely hundreds, possibly thousands, city wide. He’d like to see the city do a wider survey, then take over the properties so they can be properly maintained and possibly developed.
“These orphaned properties, there are 17 just in Kensington, could be a real resource for the city, but the city needs to know where they are first,” said Wynne, who chairs the Toronto and East York Community Preservation Panel.
Real estate lawyer Bob Aaron says he’s come across a handful of orphaned properties in his career. He said the properties were established in the 1800s, when landowners could in some cases create their own roads that would eventually be sold, along with the homes that sat along them.
“It’s a vestige of poor planning, or no planning,” Aaron said.
“There’s a whole bunch of them in the City of Toronto and nobody wants to take them over, nobody wants to insure them, nobody wants to repair them, shovel the snow.”
The problem is that the orphaned streets and laneways are essentially worthless, says Wynee. And because most of the properties are surrounded by homes that rely on them for access, no new owner can build on them, he says.
“It would just be a nightmare,” he said. “And as soon as somebody registers a laneway in their own name, they’re going to get a tax bill.”
As well, he says there’s no incentive for the city to expropriate the properties and maintain them like ordinary streets.
“If the city takes over one property, then the people who are surrounding all the other orphaned laneways will want their laneway looked after too, and that’s going to be a huge burden on the taxpayer.”
Aaron says he’s also skeptical about the idea of building a registry of orphaned properties city-wide since they have virtually no value.
“It’s only going to cost money to make an inventory of them and then what do you have? It sits on a shelf somewhere.”
Back on Ellen Avenue, Enrietti says she is aware the city doesn’t own the street. But as a taxpayer, she says she feels the city should act to keep her neighbourhood clean.
“I pay $30,000 a year in property taxes,” said Enrietti, who owns three Oxford Street homes. “I do expect some sort of protection.”
Saxe told CBC Toronto she’s working with city staff to see if some solution to the Ellen Avenue situation can be found, as well as a wider answer to the orphaned laneways question.
She says she’s hoping that in some cases when new owners build adjacent to these lanes and streets, those new owners will voluntarily take them over and agree to clean them up.
But Aaron says that could be wishful thinking.
“Nobody’s going to want to buy them,” he says. “There’s negative value to these laneways.”
