A corporation buys a run-down building downtown, cheap, because it's "derelict." No plan to fix it. No plan to house a single soul. The building was never the point. The dirt underneath it is.

So they demolish it. What's left is a flat, dead surface lot, the cheapest thing to "own." No tenants, no upkeep, no risk. Just asphalt and a pay-station where somebody's home once stood.

No permit means the city assesses it as low-value vacant land, not the cash business it really is. Low value, low tax. This has been going on for nearly a decade.

They collect cash parking every single day, and watch the land quietly balloon. "absentee landowners captured the gains… thanks to the public investment of the very communities they neglected." (Strong Towns) You build that value. They pocket it. And the tax bill? A joke. You cover the difference, every year.

An empty lot isn't idle money. It's active money. Security contracts. Private patrols. Police overtime to sweep unhoused Edmontonians off the pavement like litter. Every link gets paid to keep it bare.

This is land banking. Barely-taxed dirt costs almost nothing to sit on, so they wait, and wait, cashing in on the rising value while giving nothing back. They profit from doing absolutely nothing while familys freeze three blocks away.

A pit isn't a failure of the plan. It IS the plan.

The city knows. It wrote the 90% report. And it can act: its first-in-Canada derelict tax subclass charges 3× the rate. But enforcement crawls. A June 30 deadline, then $1,000 fines, pocket change to a land bank.

It could also stop paying cops to sweep and beat unhoused Edmontonians off empty, useless land. It just... doesn't. Donations, or plain comfort with the status quo. Either way, the lots win, and we pay.

People are already fighting back. @edmontonpittour documents every single pit. Now let's win the rest: make them register these lots as businesses, tax the land at what it's really worth, and put homes where the pits are.