On one side of the street, like scarecrows, a clutch of raggedy homeless men and women while away the hours outside All Saints Anglican Church.On the other side of the street, an empty lot: an expanse of grass with a couple of trees, cordoned off by a chain-link fence.At the edge of the lot sits an enormous vacant house, once upon a time stately, and, later, not so stately, now fallen into ramshackle disrepair. But for decades, until a few years ago, it had offered 30 rooms for board. For people who live in rooms. If they could scrape together the money, with social assistance.All of it owned by the same couple, Bhushan and Rekha Taneja, whose large real estate portfolio includes many other rooming houses across Toronto.And for a decade that lot, at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne Streets, has sat unused while property values in the city have skyrocketed.Perhaps not yet enriching enough for the owners in a metropolis bursting its seams. Maybe not yet lucrative enough to sell in one of the few remaining urban corridors where the critically impoverished carve out a slapdash existence.The idle lots and vacant house at 214-230 Sherbourne were put on the market early this year. Long enough for the Toronto Affordable Housing Office to at least briefly consider buying. And then it was abruptly taken off the market.“There was no real engagement,” says Sean Gadon, director of the Affordable Housing Office. “It may have also been the result of (the property) being in the media at the time. My understanding is that the owners were only interested in selling to private buyers.”Think condos, along a downtown swath, astride an arterial road that has undergone extensive gentrification, in parts, but is still a prime locus for rooming houses, mission houses, soup kitchens and decrepit social housing.Together, the empty lot and the vacant house are worth at least $4 million, according to city tax records, which seems awfully low in developer-eat-devel ...
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