Condominium: A Transformative Innovation in Property and Local Government

0:00 – Introduction and Vancouver's Condominium Skyline

0:00 Ryan Grant: So next up we have Professor Douglas Harris from UBC's Peter A. Allard School of Law, and he's going to show you about condominium, a transformative innovation in property and local government. Let me bring in Doug. Hello Doug.

0:20 Douglas Harris: Hello Ryan, how are you today?

0:20 Ryan Grant: I'm very well, thank you. We're excited to have you here. I know before the conference there were quite a few people that actually submitted your name, and that's why we reached out to you, and we're really excited to just have you here. And I'll let you kind of introduce yourself and get into your presentation.

0:44 Douglas Harris: Okay, thank you for that. And hello everybody, thank you for spending a few minutes with me today. I'm going to offer something quite different than what Wendy has just provided. It's really helpful detail in the nuts and bolts of managing and running a strata property. My plan is to step back a little bit and to provide some of the context, both contemporary, historical, and a little bit of the global context, for this form of ownership and of local government.

1:26 Condominium is relatively new, it's only been around just over half a century, and in that time it's very quickly become not just a sideshow but one of the dominant forms of property ownership, and also increasingly of local government. And so I just would like to talk a little bit about that, and to tell you how I come at this. I teach property law at the Allard School of Law at UBC, so we're in Vancouver, and I started teaching in 2001.

2:01 I wanted to teach a property law course that was connected to the city that I lived and worked in, and that my students, most of whom would live and work in, and look out on the city of Vancouver. And even in 2001 increasingly the dominant form, the dominant legal architecture, was becoming that of condominium. And I'll show a few slides, these will be very familiar to many of you.

2:34 Vancouver House, one of the starchitect-designed iconic buildings in Vancouver. One looks at the skyline of Vancouver, increasingly it's a skyline that is dominated not by the commercial office tower but by the residential condominium tower. And this is a relatively new development. Here's the tallest tower in British Columbia, I think it may be soon passed if not already by one in Burnaby, the Shangri-La tower. Here it is looming over the downtown core, and from the angle of the photograph, over the local mountains.

3:16 Many of you will know this tower. It's a mixed-use development with a hotel in the lower 15 floors and condominium units in the upper floors. To its right is the MacMillan Bloedel building and one of the Bentall centres. An interesting illustration of this shift in the skyline and the appearance of Vancouver, from one that was dominated by office towers to one that is increasingly dominated by condominium towers.

3:53 And you can see them running down with Coal Harbour in the background towards Stanley Park. A few decades earlier these towers, many of them if they were residential, would have been residential tenancy rental buildings. Now almost exclusively condominium buildings. This is true not just in the city core, but here out in Burnaby, with Central Park just to the left, Metrotown, and Brentwood in the background, these rising clusters of condominium.

4:35 So this was the landscape that I was trying, at least in part, to explain to my students, and to help them understand this form of ownership. This form of ownership that would become, for many of them, if they were fortunate enough to own land in the Lower Mainland, they would be owning land less and less in the single house lot and more and more as a strata lot in an apartment tower or a townhouse complex.

5:03 It would also be a legal form that they were encountering in their practice as lawyers. Vancouver is extraordinary in the extent to which its residents now live within condominium, either as owners or as tenants. For owners within condominium we have the highest proportion of people living within it of any city in North America. But this isn't only a Vancouver story.

5:38 – Condominium Skylines in New York and Dubai

5:38 Douglas Harris: This is the skyline of New York, looking across Central Park in the foreground. A skyline that was again once dominated by the Empire State Building, the Pan Am building, the MetLife building, other commercial office buildings, increasingly dominated in recent years by the condominium form. Condominium really is spreading and becoming the dominant form of land in cities across North America, and not just in North America. This is, oh sorry, wrong slide.

6:21 This is the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It's mixed usage, retail and commercial on the bottom floors, hotel, and then residential. The tallest building in the world now is primarily a condominium. So another way of thinking about it is that with all this glass and steel and concrete and structural architecture, the legal architecture of these buildings is the condominium form. A legal architecture that allows for, as I'm sure all of you know, the capacity to, as an owner of an individual unit, you own a share with all of the other owners of the common property.

7:17 And together you have voting rights in a strata corporation, or condominium corporation, or association of owners, with the capacity to make and enforce rules about the use of the common property and also the use of the individual lots. And if we look elsewhere in the world, this is a development on the outskirts of Shanghai.

7:44 – Condominium Housing in China and Ethiopia

7:44 Douglas Harris: The scale of development in China dwarfs anything that's happening certainly in Vancouver or Canada or even North America. This is Evergrande's Life in Venice development. Evergrande is, as I suspect many of you have heard, one of the developers that's in serious difficulty in China. Life in Venice I think is a guide to the canals that you can see between the rows of apartment towers. In China there's no equivalent for individuals of fee simple or freehold ownership, but there are long-term leaseholds, 40 years, 60 years.

8:33 And so to the extent that there is market housing where people can buy units in the marketplace, those units are created within the condominium form. Condominium has become the form in which those who own land are owning land. And one last example, this is from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. As in much of the developing world, there's this massive transition of people from rural lives to urban. This is true not only in the developing world, it's true globally.

9:24 Somewhere in the early 2000s more than half of humanity now lives in cities. We've become an urban species. And in other parts of the developing world where this is happening rapidly, now there's a huge housing shortage. And in Ethiopia the central government has used the condominium form, so it's built these four and five and six storey apartment units, sold them at subsidized rates to individuals or families coming into the cities, and is using the condominium form.

10:06 So they become owners now in a unit that after a number of years can be bought and sold on the market. So condominium has become the form that governments and developers around the world are using in order to provide housing. One last image of this, of one of the hundreds of thousands of units that have been created in Addis Ababa and Ethiopia.

10:34 This is a long way from the luxury pencil-thin towers that are now increasingly dominating the New York skyline, or even the Shangri-La or Metrotown or Brentwood in British Columbia, but it is revealing of the extent to which governments around the world through legislation have chosen the condominium form as the form in which people will find housing.

11:09 – Origins of Statutory Condominium Legislation

11:09 Douglas Harris: Now, how do we get here? How did we get to a situation where there are now millions of condominium developments around the world, creating tens of millions of units, housing hundreds of millions of people, and everywhere this is expanding and growing? How did we get to this point? Well, in North America the story begins with the change in the National Housing Act in the United States. A small change in the National Housing Act in 1961 allowed for the federal mortgage insurance to extend from single lot or single family developments in single lot houses, to one-family units in multi-unit structures.

12:06 Right, the mortgage insurance that the National Housing Act provided to lenders now extended to lenders who were taking one-family units in multi-unit structures, taking condominium or strata lots as security for a loan. And this precipitated across the United States the development in individual states of statutory condominium forms. And the same thing happens in Canada. British Columbia was the first province in Canada to pass a form of statutory condominium, or to create condominium legislation.

12:53 We did so in 1966, borrowing a template from New South Wales. In 1966 we passed the Strata Titles Act, and in doing so became the first province to introduce a statutory condominium form. And all the other provinces in Canada followed in the coming years. And so by the early 1970s across Canada the statutory condominium form was available everywhere. And here you can see I've underlined section three of the first Act in British Columbia, the Strata Titles Act: land may be subdivided into strata lots by the deposit of a strata plan, and those lots act as interests in land.

13:42 Right, they may be transferred, leased, mortgaged or otherwise dealt with in the same manner and form as any land the title to which is registered. So with the deposit of a strata plan one could create strata lots, and those strata lots were parcels of land, parcels of land that could be owned separately, registered separately, taxed separately. And so this form, which now increasingly dominates our property market in Vancouver, in British Columbia, appeared only in 1966.

14:28 And the first use of it was actually not in the urban core, it was in Port Moody. And it was this development, Chateau Place, strata plan number one.

14:38 – BC's First Strata Plan in Port Moody

14:46 Douglas Harris: This was the first strata plan deposited in 1968, and created this three-storey mix of townhouse and apartment strata lots, and was created with the deposit of the strata plan. The strata plan is the constituting document that brings the strata lots and the strata into existence. And there was a fair bit of excitement about the possibility that condominium or strata property created. And the very first text on condominium law in Canada, by Alvin Rosenberg in 1969, attributed a great deal of power to this legal form, and it was seen to be transformative.

16:02 – Rosenberg's 1969 Vision for Condominium

16:02 Douglas Harris: So this is from that first text on condominium in Canada. In future years condominium may well be instrumental in effecting major changes. Much of the urban population may be shifted to the city cores, where costs of servicing public facilities and transportation are at a minimum. Would pull people back into the cities. So part of the impetus for condominium was to slow or to reverse urban flight. People had been leaving cities for the suburbs, and the possibility, where land was becoming increasingly valuable, would pull people back in.

16:45 And it was thought that this possibility to be an owner would help create, as Rosenberg describes it, a new class of responsible citizens with a larger stake in the community because of their private ownership. And so attributing a good deal to the importance of private ownership and to its capacity, so Rosenberg thought, to build a sense of individual ownership of a unit, but also of an investment in a community.

17:20 The trend towards tenant living may be reversed. So this is an interesting comment, this sense that somehow tenant living was less than, or less desirable than, private ownership. An interesting comment in the context of Vancouver, where residential tenancy buildings largely stopped being built in the 1970s, and only condominium towers were being built. In condominium, many of which were lived in by owner occupiers, but many also were owned by owner investors, and much of the new form of rental apartments was being built and produced within the condominium form.

18:14 Rosenberg goes on: if the democratic capitalist societies are to remain vital and vibrant, there's a need for the type of citizen who takes pride in owning their own home or business premises. You can feel the echoes of the Cold War in this. This was an appropriately market-based response, a private property response, to pressures for the need for housing. A market-based response in contrast to the response in the Soviet bloc, which was to produce social housing.

18:46 So this was a market-based response. Condominium was that form that would allow for new housing. And so there was uptake after the first, the Chateau Place in Port Moody, and then over the ensuing years developers embraced the form, lenders were prepared to take strata lots as security for a mortgage, and purchasers became increasingly comfortable. And here's a map from an article of mine a few years ago, the first 11 years of strata property development in Vancouver.

19:37 Each of those dots is an individual strata plan or individual strata development. And you can see the early density of units in Kitsilano, ranging from duplexes to three and four-storey walk-ups. Some of the towers that are appearing in the West End, Fairview Slopes, you can see some of the early developments there. Even on the Vancouver city land in False Creek South you can see some of the early developments.

20:15 Now one of the things that happened was it was not just new build developments in these early years, but also residential tenancy conversions.

20:18 – Rental Conversions and 1970s Kitsilano Protests

20:26 Douglas Harris: So this fellow has received a notice from his landlord informing him that he is now able to buy the unit that he's living in, because it is being converted from a residential tenancy development into a strata property complex. And you can see the sign, now selling luxury apartments. It doesn't look particularly luxurious, at least not by 21st century standards. And then, less than, so the payments on your mortgage loan would be less than rent if your down payment were large.

21:11 This produced protests in parts of the city, and here in Kitsilano in 1974 there's a protest over a conversion of that residential tenancy tower in the background there. It's being converted into a condominium or strata property development. And communities of tenants who could afford to live in these buildings as tenants are now being told they can buy, but many of them are not in a position to buy.

21:42 And Kitsilano in the 1970s, a different place than Kitsilano in 2023, a site of protest. And one of the conversions that became a flashpoint for protest was when Highcroft was converted, also in the early 1970s, from a residential tenancy building to a condominium building. And this provoked the city of Vancouver to impose a moratorium. It was the first in North America, a moratorium on the conversion of developments from residential tenancy buildings to condominium buildings.

22:38 A moratorium that lasted for much of the 1970s, and then was replaced by provisions that required landlords that were converting buildings from residential tenancy to condominium buildings to provide relocation funds and a certain number of months' rent to the former tenants.

23:07 – Bare Land Strata and Arbutus Ridge

23:07 Douglas Harris: So also in the early 1970s British Columbia became the first province in Canada to take a legal form that had been designed for the subdivision of buildings like this one, to create individual strata lots in buildings with the boundaries of the strata lots defined by the floors, walls and ceilings, to take that legal form and extend it to the subdivision of rural or suburban land. And this is the largest of what became known as bare land strata subdivisions in British Columbia.

23:45 This is the Arbutus Ridge development on Vancouver Island, a little bit south of Duncan, north of Victoria, looking across to Salt Spring Island and to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal. Here it is, the aerial image of it from Google Earth. I tell my students in property law that Google Earth may have all sorts of uses, military and otherwise, but I think it was designed primarily for property law professors who can show the spaces that they're talking about in the classroom.

24:19 So this is the Arbutus Ridge development, the Google Earth image. You can see it wrapping around a golf course that was at one point part of the development. The development ran into some financial difficulties in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the golf course was separated out. But it took a strata property form and used its bare land iteration to create a 646 strata lot subdivision.

24:50 And here's the location again, just south of Duncan looking across to Salt Spring Island. And this is the strata plan that brought the Arbutus Ridge development into existence, or at least this is the strata plan in its 20th phase. This was a phased development built out over two decades and 20 phases, and it's the last phase that creates the last strata lots that bring it up to 646.

25:25 And Arbutus Ridge, this is from the home page, describes itself as a seaside community for active adults. It's a lifestyle community, a community that is marketed and targeted towards active adults. And the homepage references Sun City in Arizona as the template for these communities that were built targeting a particular demographic. And let me pause here for a moment to say that I've focused to this point on the property interest, that condominium creates these individual lots and a share of the common property.

26:16 – Bylaws as Private Local Government

26:20 Douglas Harris: Those individual lots and the share of common property are embedded within a structure of private local government. And so in that private local government, with the capacity to create and enforce bylaws, it's those bylaws that allow for the construction of a particular type of community. And in this case a community that limits the number of occupants in each unit, that limits what can be done with landscaping, with the form of the buildings, with what you can park in your driveways.

27:05 It's also that form of government that enables a collection of strata fees, and then their use for the provision of community amenities, in this case including a games room and swimming pool and a dock, but also services, in this case a security guard and cameras at the gate. I've been doing some work on bare land strata in the last few years, and here are a few maps of that work.

27:40 – Mapping BC's Bare Land Strata Developments

27:41 Douglas Harris: There are, as of 2019, 2,600 bare land strata developments in British Columbia. And you can see in that inset map in the lower left they're concentrated in the Okanagan, in the Fraser Valley, and on southeastern Vancouver Island. And the larger map shows southeastern Vancouver Island. Of those 2,600 bare land stratas, that creates almost 50,000 individual strata lots. Almost half of them are on southern Vancouver Island, and many of them are in the municipalities around the city of Victoria itself.

28:27 You can see the density in Langford and Colwood, and then it doesn't show it on this map, but the Saanich peninsula. Again, just sort of by way of recap: condominium, or strata property, and I've used those terms interchangeably. In British Columbia we use the strata property form, and in much of the world it's known as condominium. Other places call it apartment ownership, or horizontal title, or sectional ownership, or unit title.

29:07 But under those different labels, in urban cores and in many suburbs and in spaces where rural land is becoming suburban, the condominium form, with its production of individual lots that can be owned within a structure of local government, is no longer the exception, it's becoming the norm. And now I'd like to focus for a little bit on the structure of local government. And it's a structure of local government that I've labelled a private local government.

29:48 – Strata Governance Compared to Municipal Government

29:51 Douglas Harris: And it's private in the sense that one's right to participate in the strata corporation is a function not of citizenship or of residence but of ownership. One has a right to participate as an owner. It's a form of government by, not of residents, not of some combination of residency or citizenship, which is how we identify the right to vote in public governments, provincial or federal. Either the right to vote, the capacity to participate in this form of private local government, is defined by one's status as an owner.

30:47 What's also interesting though is that many times that form of government is described as akin to or similar to municipal government. The AGM is commonly described as analogous to, or similar to, a town hall meeting. The annual general meeting or special general meeting is often described as similar to a town hall meeting. And strata property government, the strata corporation, is doing many of the same things that municipal governments do.

31:28 Municipal governments are concerned primarily with property interests and with servicing property, and that's what strata governments do. They're concerned primarily with a set of bylaws that regulate the use of the common property and of the private property, and then of collecting fees, a form of tax, that provides services and amenities to the residents in those units. And this form of property and ownership has enabled, particularly in the urban context, a new density of owners.

32:16 – The New Density of Owners

32:16 Douglas Harris: It's been the case that humans have lived in close proximity in cities for decades, but until recently we lived in towers as tenants. And now we have the capacity to live in towers as owners. And what the strata form enables is this massive increase in not so much the density of people but the density of owners. So the idea of ownership emerged in a context where owners were spread out on a horizontal plane over the surface of the earth.

32:57 And this is what bare land strata allows, allows for the subdivision of land in a single plane. In a building context that allows for a subdivision within a building. And so now owners can be stacked in a vertical column 40 or 60, 80 or 100 or more, as in the Burj Khalifa tower, storeys high. This is a massive increase in the density of owners. It's a reconfiguration of ownership.

33:29 And one of the things that I've been interested in is how this new density of owners is changing what it means to be an owner of an interest. And let me shift from the geographical and historical to look at some of the particular legal issues that arise in the condominium context that are a function of this new density of ownership.

34:01 – Korolek Case: Eviction and Forced Sale

34:01 Douglas Harris: This is a townhouse development of 36 units in Toronto. For those of you that know Toronto, it's near Bay and Bloor streets just east of Bay Street, not far from Yorkville. And this development, Toronto Condominium Corporation number 747, had an owner within it, Ms Korolekh, who is what many would describe as a neighbour from hell. She was loud, she was abusive, she had a large dog which she would let run to the end of its tether and stop it just as it was about to appear to jump on residents.

34:56 She would climb onto balconies and poison plants. She was threatening, she was abusive, and her behaviour had destroyed any sense of community in this development. And eventually, after many orders that she stop this behaviour and many findings for violating the bylaws, which were ignored, the condominium sought an order from the Ontario Superior Court to evict Ms Korolekh and to force her to sell her unit. And the Superior Court in Ontario granted that order, that she'd be evicted and that she sell her unit.

35:54 And this is what the judge in that case had to say: that in all of these circumstances, her violent, abusive, threatening and destructive behaviour, it would be unwise to try to reintegrate Ms Korolekh into a community that fears her and that she has persistently tried to intimidate. One joins condominium corporations voluntarily, on the basis they agreed to share collective property and abide by the rules. There's no right to continue membership in this corporation.

36:25 That this community wants a clear intention to harm it, and a persistent refusal to abide by its rules, have been exhibited in the extreme ways in this case, as Korolekh has irreparably broken the bond with them, and an effective order cannot be made that would force these parties to now join together. And so the judge orders that she'd be evicted and that she sell her unit. And let me pause there for a moment to say just how extraordinary an order this is in the context of an owner, that on the basis of behaviour she'd be evicted and forced to sell.

37:07 If this were a city block or a suburban subdivision with a neighbour exhibiting all of these threatening, destructive behaviours, a court would never provide an order that she be evicted and be forced to sell. There may be an action for wrongdoing in tort, the police would be called, there may even be criminal punishment. But there would never be an order, an eviction, and a forced sale order.

37:40 But there are now a number of cases in Ontario, and also in British Columbia, where courts have been prepared to make such an eviction and forced sale order in a context of chronic and extreme anti-social behaviour.

37:52 – Jordison Case in BC Courts

37:58 Douglas Harris: And the first reported example in the case law that I've come across is this one, involving a mother and son, Rose and Jordy Jordison, who owned a strata lot in this complex in Surrey. They had a very volatile relationship. They were frequently loud and argumentative, they would host loud parties. Jordy Jordison was crude, threatening and intimidating. There was garbage that piled up in the common areas outside their unit.

38:42 The behaviour continued over four years. There were twenty thousand dollars in fines. None of this was having any effect on the behaviour. In this case the strata corporation sought an order that the Jordisons be evicted and that Ms Jordison be forced to sell the unit, and the BC Supreme Court granted that order in 2012.

39:09 The Jordisons appealed, and the BC Court of Appeal overturned that order, on the grounds that there needed to be a first order that the behaviour cease, and that if the Jordisons were in contempt of that first order then perhaps the order for eviction and for sale might be appropriate, but not as a first order. So the BC Court of Appeal threw out the order for eviction and sale, but upheld the order that they stop behaving as they were.

39:49 The behaviour continued. The strata corporation went back to the BC Supreme Court for an order that they be forced to sell, and the BC Supreme Court granted that order. And this time the BC Court of Appeal upheld that order. In this decision, the behaviour was not as severe as in the Korolekh case, but it nonetheless warranted the order that the strata corporation sought.

40:33 And here the court says, paragraph 25, the competing private property rights which support a strict interpretation of the Act, and of the power that it gives the court to order eviction and forced sale, that strict interpretation must in the court's opinion yield to the rights and duties of the collective as embodied in the bylaws and enforceable by court order. The old adage that a person's home is their castle is subordinated by the exigencies of modern living in a condominium setting.

41:10 Right, that this condominium setting, where there was a proximity or a density of owners that was new, warranted a transformation in what it meant to be an owner. That as an owner you were now subject to a minimum threshold of behaviour in order to maintain your status as owner. At some point your rights of ownership could be lost if you failed to live up to your responsibilities in order to be a part of a community.

41:41 Now, when I looked at these cases, my initial thought was that these orders were appropriate, that ownership was about rights but also responsibilities. But I found buried in most of them a reference, and in most of them it was in passing, to mental illness.

42:01 – Mental Illness and Duty to Accommodate

42:01 Douglas Harris: And there's a reference to Jordy Jordison's mental illness, and there was the beginning of a human rights complaint that didn't proceed, but the basis of that complaint would have been that Jordy suffered from a mental illness that predisposed him, made it difficult, to live in close proximity with others, and that such an order to evict and sell their unit would be discrimination on the basis of disability.

42:40 And in most cases that analysis around whether there's a human rights claim isn't developed, but it is in this case, another Ontario case involving JMV, a woman who suffered from severe mental illness, who was in and out of hospital for that mental illness, sometimes involuntarily committed to that hospital. Her behaviour wasn't violent or threatening or intimidating. She was a hoarder, and the apartment filled up with stuff, and as a result there was water damage and the danger of fire and pests.

43:22 And she would be removed and involuntarily committed, the condominium corporation would clean up the apartment, there would be garbage truck loads of stuff removed, she would come back, would be stable for some months, but the behaviour would then resume. And eventually the court said that the condominium corporation had accommodated her mental illness under the Ontario Human Rights Code to the point of undue hardship. That it was required to accommodate her mental illness, and not to do so would be discrimination on the basis of disability, but that accommodation only had to go so far as undue hardship, and that point had been reached.

44:20 And so in this case the court ordered her eviction and the sale of her unit. And now let me bring this to a close with this observation, that I think of these issues, in this one example of mental illness, and the challenges that the proximity of ownership creates, and of mental illness in this density of owners creates, is something that strata corporations are going to need to grapple with.

45:00 And attention is going to need to be paid to the Human Rights Code and to the human rights regime, and to the duty of strata corporations to accommodate, not just mental illness but many forms of disability, but accommodate to the point of undue hardship. And I think this series of cases reveals some of the particular challenges that this form of ownership, which is still relatively new, it's only been around not quite 60 years in British Columbia, but 60 years has become not the exception but the norm for owners.

45:48 These cases reveal some of the challenges that the structure of private local government that condominium creates are going to face going forward. So let me close there. I think there's a few minutes for questions. I'd be very happy to answer any. Before I do: UBC, with the University of New South Wales, are hosting a workshop in May on multi-owner properties, and you can find a link if people are interested.

46:28 There's possibilities to attend in person or online, and you'll find a link through the Law and Cities research group at the law school.

46:33 – Q&A: Airspace Parcels and Legal Complexity

46:35 Douglas Harris: So Ryan, with that, let me stop and turn things over to questions.

46:41 Ryan Grant: Awesome, yeah, that was a great presentation. I posted the questions on the right hand side there so you can start to see what they are.

46:50 Douglas Harris: Kathy, I believe the first strata was in BC in Port Hardy. There was an early strata corporation, strata development, in Port Hardy. I think it may have been surveyed first but registered second, but I will go and check. And I think it was a company town. It was part of the pulp mill development anyway. I'll have a look at it, thanks for the tip. Thomas: can you describe how air space parcels compare to traditional strata structures?

47:27 We'd like to see more. So developers now have a choice when developing a building, or developing a complex that has multiple uses. So one can, right, there are many examples where there's retail at one level, there may be professional offices in floors two through four, there may be a hotel in floors six through ten, and then residential strata lots in floors 11 through 20. And so these very different uses create different demands on the common property.

48:05 How do you separate out the expenses? And one way to do that is with sections, separate sections within a strata corporation. Another way to do it that creates more separation is with air space parcels. So first the developer would deposit an air space plan that creates separate parcels of land defined in three dimensions. And there are now some developments that have three or four or five air space parcels.

48:42 And then you can build a building, and different parts of the building may be occupied by separate air space parcels, and those air space parcels can themselves be subdivided with the deposit of a strata plan that creates individual strata lots. So there's different techniques for using these tools to subdivide land in ways that create more or less separation. And I think increasingly developers are using air space parcels first and then subdividing some of those air space parcels with strata lots, rather than using sections within a strata corporation.

49:31 So yes, with these multi-use developments I think we are likely to see more. The fourth question: are the bank and financial sectors the origin of this type of property, and then secondarily an individual who individually owned the land, not the actual buyers of strata lots? So I think, I mean, the success of this legal form, and by success I mean its proliferation, it is one of the most successful innovations in property simply by virtue of its proliferation.

50:15 I think the numbers are that half of the residents in Vancouver now live within condominium either as owners or as tenants. I'm not quite sure that it's quite that high, but it's enormously successful measured by its proliferation. And that success has required that it be a form that developers want to build, that purchasers want to buy, and that lenders are prepared to take as a security interest for loans.

50:42 Right, so lenders need to be prepared to take a mortgage in a strata lot as a security interest for a loan. So the success of the form is a function of builders wanting to build, purchasers wanting to buy, and financiers prepared to finance. And there's a whole set of incentives that have contributed to that success in the tax system. So I think banks and the financial sector are an important part of this.

51:22 And another part of the success, I mean, money has been pouring into cities. It's pouring into cities primarily to build strata property units or condominium developments. And so condominium is a financial asset, and for many people who can invest in land they can do so at the level of an apartment, not at the level of a freestanding parcel of land. And so it's become a vehicle that's drawn money into cities.

52:03 Fifth question: the legal architecture seems incredibly complex, yet it claimed to be a consumer protection law. So this is interesting. In Australia many of the responsibilities for strata property are housed within ministries of consumer affairs. And so part of the early impetus for strata property was to create templates, right, so if you were to buy an ownership interest in an apartment there would be one template, the strata property template, that would be the template that you would use, rather than creating a whole set of individual forms.

52:50 So it was sort of the simplicity, the off the rack nature, of condominium ownership or the strata property unit that was intended as a form of consumer protection. I think it's a real question, with now the complexity, particularly these developments that are multi-use with air space parcels, and condominium developments within those air space parcels, and those condominium developments share expenses with other air space parcels, and those expenses are allocated in complex easement agreements.

53:27 To understand exactly what you as an individual lot owner are responsible for, what's your share of the parking maintenance expenses, what's your share of the common amenities, it's now increasingly difficult to figure out with all of this complexity. And so I think we're in danger of creating such complexity that it's hard for the individual owner to understand exactly what it is they're buying. And I think that's going to be an important issue for us to look at.

53:55 Ryan Grant: Yes. So we're just wrapping up there, looks like we have 30 seconds left, so we made it quite to the end. We have a few other questions but we will reserve those for being answered later, so we'll make sure to touch base with you again, Doug. Thank you so much for your time and your presentation. I learned a few new things as well, and I'm always happy to have you on, and we really appreciate it.

54:27 Douglas Harris: Thank you Ryan, enjoy the rest of the workshop.

54:29 Ryan Grant: Thanks. So next up we have Ryan Stenquist with Condo Clear Services, and he's going to cover what are your strata documents saying.