Cochrane Chimo
photos courtesy of cochrane

The Tiny Ontario Town Selling Properties for $10 a Pop

Up north, a savvy real-estate strategy is making the Canadian dream of affordable housing real again
By Katie Underwood

It’s hard to buy a decent hamburger for $10 anymore, let alone property. But in Cochrane, Ontario, a 5,000-person town 700 kilometres north of Toronto, one purple banknote could soon net Canadians their very own chunk of land. Last October, the rural municipality caused a stir when it announced plans to offload roughly 1,500 serviced and unserviced residential lots for that low, low price, quickly accumulating a 4,000-person list of interested parties (and developers) from across the country and around the world.

Some might call it a gimmick, but according to Peter Politis, Cochrane’s three-term mayor, the town’s $10 blitz is a creative antidote to Canada’s seemingly interminable housing-inventory crisis and a powerful incentive to pry young families and skilled workers away from the border. With just a month until the town releases the details of its fleshed-out regulatory plan, Politis discussed its potential to double Cochrane’s population, the town’s thoroughly modern amenities, and how to sell Gen Z on the great outdoors.

Memorial Bridge – Copy
In downtown Cochrane, residents enjoy free Wi-Fi, a public bike share program and paddleboat rides in Commando Lake, a natural body of water in the central core

How long have you lived in Cochrane?
I’m originally from London, Ontario, but I’ve been in Cochrane since 1990. Before that, I was just a young cowboy going from town to town in my brand-new truck, working forestry jobs and putting money in the bank. I met my soon-to-be wife within six months of arriving here. We later had three kids and nine grandkids and, wanting to make a difference in the community (rather than just complaining about it), I ran for mayor. I couldn’t have planned all that if I tried.

How would you describe the Cochrane way of life to someone who’s never visited?
There’s that stereotype of small northern towns: Is there running water? Are there toilets? Cochrane is a modern municipality. We’re only 5,000 people, but we have a multi-layered economy: two forestry mills, the second-largest gold mine in North America, plus a strong white-collar workforce of public servants. Industry aside, residents love how peaceful and family-oriented the town is. I don’t know everybody, but my children go to the same school—and have the same teachers—as my wife did. That closeness probably wouldn’t be the case if I was still in London.

How does the town compare to major urban centres on the infrastructure-and-amenities fronts? Asking for city (or suburb) slickers who might be mulling over a move.
In general, we do a lot with less. In Southern Ontario, you have 1,000 of everything; we have one. We don’t have a massive Costco, but if you’re willing to travel an hour to Timmins, we do. We can get Amazon deliveries here within a week. We also have two or three parks, the newest rec centre in the municipality and a mall—though, maybe not the size you’re used to. We also have a dome of free Wi-Fi coverage over part of our downtown. Do you have that in Toronto?

We’re not exactly lacking on the free Wi-Fi front. Starbucks is never far away!
Fair. I could go on. During my last term, Cochrane offered a free public bike-share program. We have some of the best snowmobile trails in the world. Also, people think, Oh my god, you must be so far north! We’re literally on the 49th parallel, right in line with Winnipeg. In the winter, there’s no mess or slush like there is in Southern Ontario. It just stays dry-cold. We’re like the Arizona of the north. 

In pretty much every major city and suburb area in Canada, affordable housing is painfully hard—if not impossible—to find. What was the state of Cochrane’s real estate market before you announced your $10 plan?
We had low inventory to start and really needed to increase it. Forestry and mining were always big industries around here, but mining in particular really started to take off because of the batteries needed for electric vehicles. Nickel and lithium are all around Cochrane, and a new base metal mine is scheduled to go up not too far from us late in 2026. A lot of miners work weeklong rotations at their sites, then go home. With this mine, there’s a need to permanently relocate workers, so we need housing now. 

And $10 for a plot of land? To most Canadians, that’s a fall-off-your-chair, what’s-the-catch price. Did your council do any budget math to come up with that figure?
No math. We needed to convince people—especially those in the natural resource workforce—to uproot their families. The $10 figure we came up with at city council was meant to create an incentive and generate discussion. It’s marketing 101. According to a study we just did with consultants at Watson & Associates, Cochrane’s population is projected to double in the next 10 to 15 years as a result of initiatives like this one.

How do you plan to divvy up all those plots? 
A few years ago, anticipating this boom, we expanded Cochrane’s settlement area, which was a two-year process. We also built a 400-lot subdivision that’s turnkey for investors looking to relocate their workforce. In total, we now have upwards of 1,000 serviced and unserviced lots—maybe more. The serviced lots, for individuals and families, are going to be available to people who can show they have the financial wherewithal to build a home on their lot within roughly two years. Developers can pitch us plans for the unserviced lots. The price per plot will be $10 for them, too.

Are you at all anxious about starting a big-city bidding war?
A bidding war between developers is exactly what we want, but we’re only going to pick ones that have an interest in investing in the community. We can’t just focus on putting up $600,000 bungalows for miners who are making $150,000 a year. We have to look at the whole housing continuum—homes for seniors, low-income housing, tiny homes, et cetera.

Who’s shown interest in the lots so far? Have you noticed any strange vehicles touring the town lately?
We got a lot of attention from the media after we announced the program last October, but people aren’t really coming to see Cochrane in person yet. That said, we now have a list of more than 4,000 interested names from across Canada—and a lot of international requests as well. We don’t expect all of them to buy, but we do expect a pretty vigorous response once we get things moving. The town still has to create the regulatory framework that’ll allow us to do the $10 lots as well as another incentive: property-tax relief over the first three years after purchase. We anticipate finishing that plan by November. 

This $10 blitz could fundamentally reshape Cochrane. Have you received any resistance from current residents? How do you handle skeptics who think this is all just a gimmick?
There are more skeptics than believers. The typical feedback is: Why are you giving away expensive lots for $10? A natural question, but we’re not losing anything—those empty lots aren’t selling. We’re taking properties that are doing nothing for us and turning them into money generators. It’s pure revenue. If we increase our population, we’ll increase the municipality’s tax levy by millions and millions of dollars, which could fund infrastructure and maintenance—say, for roads and construction—for decades to come. The other thing is: I’m not expecting Cochrane to become Toronto. If we double in size, that’s still only 11,000 to 12,000 people. We’ll still be a small municipality, and we’ll never stop being one. That’s how we’re attracting people here. 

At some of your recent town halls, some residents raised Cochrane’s existing struggle to provide fundamentals like adequate medical care and class sizes—even before the Great Doubling. How do you plan to fix those gaps?
Families moving here have two key questions: How are we getting medical care? And: How are our kids going to be educated? We have to be able to answer them. We’re already talking with the Ministry of Education to make sure we can maintain the education requirements if we have to expand class sizes rapidly. In terms of doctors: we have two now, but we could really use four more. We have a pretty attractive incentive program for physicians—we’re investing hundreds of thousands of dollars per doctor in things like housing and office space. Some doctors have already expressed interest in it, so I assume that won’t be an issue down the road.

Miners aside, who else is the $10 plan’s target demo?
Gen Z folks who live within that 100-kilometre band along the U.S. border. In Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, most of them will never own a home, never realize that quintessential Canadian dream. We’re saying, Not only can you own here, but we’re going to provide you with a financial leg up to do so—and give you one of the best backyards on the planet. So far, that messaging has been very successful. 

The typical Gen Z is hyper-connected. It would be pretty hard to sell a lot of them on small-town charm.
For Gen Zs, the first question is always: Is there Wi-Fi? They expect to have everything at their fingertips. Here, you can have the best of the technology you have in the "mainstream" part of the country and beautiful natural environments. As a personal example, my property has a campsite out back. When my family gathers for Easter and Christmas, we’re out there around the fire—and we’re all on our phones. Our grandkids are Snapchatting in the middle of the forest. The ability to marry those two dynamics is, I think, very marketable.

And what if they did want to get out of town? I noticed the Cochrane Aerodrome doesn’t have any scheduled flights.
We’re working on the transportation side of things. Ontario Northland is reinstating its passenger train service by mid-2026. Most people coming to Cochrane fly into Timmins, anyway. And it probably takes less time to get from there to here than the time it takes most people to commute home in Southern Ontario.

It took me an hour to get across Toronto in traffic the other day, so point taken.
On top of all that, anything you want within town is a five-minute walk away. If I want to go home and spend my lunch hour with my wife, I go. If I want to go to our downtown beach—who has that?—and spend my lunch riding a paddleboat around Commando Lake, that’s a two-minute walk from my office. In Cochrane, you’re no longer married to the rat race. There is no rat race.

Have you thought about what it’ll be like to be mayor of the newer, larger Cochrane?
No, actually. I’m in my third term now; I haven’t considered what I’ll be doing from a future standpoint. The growth would be a big change, but the reality is we’d still have a seven-person council, just with more infrastructure money, more services and more diversity. Those are all good things. If the $10 plan becomes unmanageable, we’ll pivot, but it’s amazing to think about all the enthusiastic new people who could come here. It reminds me of how I felt when I first arrived.

If you pull this off, it’ll be a great Canadian real-estate success story. Do you think it might kick off a bigger migration northward?
At the very least, I think what we’re doing has been an eye-opener for other small-town mayors. (We all talk.) I always think about the congestion issues in the southern parts of the country—and the fact that Canada is the only G7 country without high-speed rail. Why aren’t we making better use of all our space? Northern Ontario makes up almost 90 per cent of the province’s land mass but houses just six per cent of its population. Cochrane isn’t the wild west, but we’re still building up this part of the country, which is cool. I’m telling you, folks, get out of the south. What are you waiting for?