On This Day - 1 October 1924

Starting an occasional series, prompted by the local headlines a century ago today. The Colonist newspaper's back issues, digitized and online up to 1980 at https://britishcolonist.ca/, are a wonderfully rich source of contemporary information. I hope they're planning to upload the next decade's worth soon!

https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist0924uvic_24/page/n1/mode/1up?view=theater

Let's see: murder trial, war, national and international politics, elections, shipwreck - nothing new under the sun! and an oddly specific echo of today's news, disastrous flooding in the eastern United States.

Lower down on the front page is a not very eye-catching headline: "DEAL LIKELY TO BE CONSUMMATED".

A Oak Bay Council meeting of the Committee of the Whole is described, in which "all phases of the offer of the Oak Bay Reverted Lands Syndicate to buy from the municipality 499 of Oak Bay's reverted lots for $75,000, paying $15,000 down, and the balance of $60,000 in four annual installments of $15,000 each, with interest at [?3 or 5] per cent per annum, and paying the taxes on the said lots each year, were thoroughly threshed out" for four hours, to the exclusion of al other business on the agenda. The Reverted Lands Syndicate was represented by Alfred Carmichael, David Leeming, and Charles E. Yearwood.

Obviously, for us nowadays, it's the idea of Oak Bay land being snapped up 500 lots at a time as a bargain that gets a reader's attention! But what's the story behind it?

Questions:

Reverted Lands? i.e. reverted to ownership by the municipality for non-payment of municipal taxes. Many of these lots would have been vacant - a vigorous building boom was stopped by WW1, and the 1920s were economically difficult leading up to the Depression of the 1930s.

Which lots? Who owned them? What had happened to them, why were the taxes unpaid?

Sources:

George Murdoch's administrative history of Oak Bay:

in 1923," The Corporation still had some 500 lots, reverted from tax sales, on its hands and in an effort to dispose of these properties a letter was sent to the Victoria Real Estate Board requesting suggestions."

Here's some background to the syndicate from earlier in 1924:

https://archive.org/details/dailycolonist0124uvic_32/page/n73/mode/1up (column 1, "Real Estate Values")

Some years later, the issue of reverted lands - and the related rise in municipal taxes - was a sore point in the City of Victoria, to the tune of more than 2,000 reverted lots: read here

more to come...

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- Post by Anna Sander, October 2024.