$500 building lots offered in small town Ontario

November 6, 2017

Smooth Rock Falls, a troubled town in Northeastern Ontario, is offering inexpensive building lots and incentives to anyone who will agree to build housing.
The offers come after the town’s biggest employer, a Tembec pulp mill, shut down.
Smooth Rock Falls, about 100 kilometres north of Timmins on the Mattagami River, has about 17 vacant lots that it has available for between $4,700 to $6,800—but it is offering a 90 per cent discount on the price—and waiving $2,500 on building permits and offering three-year property tax breaks. Once all the discounts are applied, new residents could buy a home building lot overlooking the town’s golf course for $500, according to town manager Luc Denault.
Denault said the town has also purchased land of the former Tembec site and is in talks to attract a new form of industry to town.
Smooth Rock Falls now has a population of around 1,300, down 50 per cent from five years ago, but it still has a grocery store, an indoor swimming pool, French-English schools, and the old motel that was sold has reopened.
The Smooth Rock Falls website claims the town’s average household income is $84,000, which is $10,000 higher than the Ontario average.