This page is legal information, not legal advice. It describes the law in general terms and cannot account for the facts of your situation. Reading it does not create a lawyer and client relationship. For advice you can act on, speak with a lawyer about your own matter.
What is taking land in Richmond Hill
Yonge North Subway Extension
Terminus and station works generate full takings of smaller parcels and temporary working easements on neighbouring properties. Temporary easements are routinely undercompensated because owners treat them as an inconvenience rather than as a compensable interference with the use of their land.
Yonge Street and arterial road works
Widenings and intersection reconstruction take frontage from commercial properties a few metres at a time. On a plaza, losing several parking spaces can hurt value more than the strip of land itself, and that loss belongs under injurious affection rather than market value.
Servicing and utility corridors
Water, sewer and transmission works proceed largely by easement. You keep title while losing the ability to build or plant across the burdened strip, and compensation should price that permanent restriction.
Worth knowing in Richmond Hill
The Yonge North Subway Extension is a priority transit project. On transit corridor land the Building Transit Faster Act, 2020 removes the right to request a hearing of necessity, so there is no 30-day window to challenge whether the taking should happen and no inquiry to wait for. Your compensation claim is untouched: market value, injurious affection, disturbance damages, business loss, interest and the section 32 costs rule all apply in full, and the section 10 election of your valuation date still runs 30 days from service of the Notice of Expropriation.
Who can expropriate in Richmond Hill
- •Metrolinx and the Province of Ontario
- •The Regional Municipality of York
- •The City of Richmond Hill
- •Hydro One and local distribution utilities
- •Toronto and Region Conservation Authority
What you are owed does not change by municipality
The Expropriations Act applies the same way in Richmond Hill as anywhere else in Ontario. What differs is which authority is taking the land and what the works do to what you keep.
- •Market value of the land taken, assessed without regard to any change in value caused by the scheme of the expropriation itself.
- •Injurious affection, the drop in value of the land you keep. On partial takings this is frequently worth more than the strip taken.
- •Injurious affection where no land is taken, under section 1(1)(b), for owners damaged by the construction of the works, and not their use, even though nothing of theirs is expropriated. Section 22 bars this claim absolutely unless it is made in writing with particulars within one year of the damage being sustained or becoming known, and nothing is served on you to warn you the clock is running.
- •Disturbance damages, the real costs you incur: moving, storage, mortgage prepayment penalties, professional fees, re-establishment.
- •Business loss, if you operate on the property, including lost profits and goodwill attributable to the works.
- •Interest at 6% per year under section 33 on the market value and injurious affection portions, running from when you cease to reside on or make productive use of the land, and where the land taken was your home, a 5% allowance on the market value of the residential part under section 18(1)(a)(i), provided the land was not being offered for sale on the date of expropriation. That allowance is payable to an owner other than a tenant; a tenant is compensated for disturbance under section 18(2) instead, apportioned by the length of the term and the tenant's investment.
Under section 32, if the Ontario Land Tribunal awards you 85% or more of the amount the authority offered, the authority pays your reasonable legal and appraisal costs, and you do not have to beat the offer outright to get there. The qualification worth knowing is that the Court of Appeal held in Shergar that "the amount offered" includes later settlement offers, not just the section 25 offer, so an improved offer raises the bar and falling below it puts costs in the Tribunal's discretion. Favourable, but conditional.
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General legal information about Ontario expropriation law, not legal advice. Reading this page does not create a solicitor and client relationship.