Quote:
Originally Posted by Franco401
A quick search of properties in the area has available houses asking for $1-5 Million, and its unlikely the province or feds will get much of a deal on them when homeowners know they're needed for a major infrastructure project.
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$1-5M is not very much when planning a major piece of public infrastructure. And actually there will always be land costs; even if the approaches are publicly owned there is the opportunity cost of not being able to sell. So it doesn't really matter if the approaches are public or private. What matters is the value of improvements on the land that will need to be destroyed and in this case it's modest (i.e. a handful of houses on large lots, not major public or commercial buildings, or a whole neighbourhood).
We often hear that expropriation is beyond the pale. But then again I was reading some council reports and one of the items being discussed at regional council is whether they should expropriate a parcel on Prince Albert Road merely to prevent its owner from building a hotel that is already approved there (
https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default...0416rc1553.pdf). My guess is that Dartmouth area residents who are against the development will generally be perfectly OK with
this example of expropriation and will not oppose it en masse because it violates their deeply held anti-expropriation beliefs.
What is really going on is that public opinion on what is reasonable or attainable has been warped by decades of heavy NIMBYism and politics. If Halifax is to do well in the future while growing by 2% a year it will need to get past this and consider infrastructure projects even if 0.00001% of the population is not happy with fair market value compensation.