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Originally Posted by onetwo_threefour
Pay a lawyer a couple of hundred bucks (or less if he's reasonable, like me) first to review the title for you and make sure there are no restrictive covenants or caveats on title that are going to cause you legal headaches over and above the normal planning issues. Inner-city neighbourhoods are rife with old caveats and covenants that can cause problems. Unfortunately, the fact that a neighbour may have done something a while ago doesn't mean much as there was a change in legal procedures in 2002-2003 that made it much more difficult to deal with these things.
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I went through this process once before with a developer here in Calgary. Not. Fun.
http://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc...06abqb230.html
Some of the restrictive covenants you will encounter in the older Calgary neighborhoods are a big PITA. I can recall one in particular that restricted the size of a home that could be built on any given lot which, effectively, prevented infills from going up. The RC was registered on all but a handful of the lots in the the area. Thanks to Furano v. Montgomery, notice of the application had to go to every owner with the same RC on their title. We had to serve a few hundred people.
There are a few different tests to meet if you want to have the RC discharged but one of them, under the Land Titles Act, requires the discharge to be in the public interest. In that case, all it would take is a neighbor or two to pop in to court with an affidavit saying it's not in their best interest and your application can be defeated.