New vacant building fee would offset 'strain' of patrolling London's 100-plus ghost buildings

City officials are proposing a new registration fee for London's fleet of ghost buildings to offset the "inordinate strain" placed on first responders who patrol them for fire, potential crime and people looking for that next-level selfie. 

The proposal, which will go in front of city council's community and protective services committee on Wednesday, is the first major revamp of the vacant building bylaw created since 2009, one year after the economic fallout of the 2008 recession caused a sudden increase in the number of factories, warehouses and homes that had become newly empty. 

A decade later, police, fire and bylaw budgets are still being squeezed by the sheer cost of keeping out the vagrants, thieves, fire bugs and urban explorers, who city officials say put their lives at risk by entering the economic ruins. 

"It's a frustrating problem," said Orest Katolyk, the city's chief bylaw officer. "They attract vandalism, crime and squatters."

A 'dangerous problem'

London's bevy of vacant buildings range from homes whose owners have died to hulking factories that once hummed with industrial might and have always seemed to have attracted the wrong crowd. Lately though, that crowd is becoming more middle-class, driven not by a sense of desperation or mischief but by bragging rights on social media.

"It's a dangerous problem with urban explorers because not only are they trespassing, that's probably the least of their worries, but they're going into buildings that are unsafe."

It's a thrill.- Caylee Siedlikowski

That sense of danger is exactly what attracts urban explorers in the first place. While urban explorers say appreciation for the past is part of the allure, they say so too is the adrenaline rush that comes with venturing into the forbidden and unknown. 

"It's a thrill," said Caylee Siedlikowski, a London woman who explores abandoned properties with her husband Adam every summer.

"You get on edge. You worry about bumping into other people or wildlife. We really enjoy it. We're just there to appreciate that someone had a life there and it was probably a happy place for someone at some point."

The London couple is part of a growing online community of people who probe Ontario's empty buildings, which range from farm houses to factories to institutions. As a city, London is well known in the community as a place with an abundance of significant ruins. 

A legendary home among urban explorers

One such building is a country home just outside the city limit. Past a weatherworn gate and a collection of gnarled trees, 'the Berghof' is legendary among Ontario's urban exploring community. 

Built by Martin Weiche, a notorious Canadian Nazi, the house once had iron eagles perched at its gates and a swastika emblazoned in the back field in its heyday. Locals are quick to tell you about the time decades ago Weiche invited Ku Klux Klansmen to burn their crosses in his yard.

When Weiche died his family waged a pitched legal battle over his estate for years. For Siedlikowski and her husband, exploring the now abandoned home was one of the London couple's highlights of last summer. 

"It was confusing because the whole layout of the house is a maze of makeshift apartments and doors that go nowhere," she said. 

"There are lots of people who get quite angry with urbexers. We want people to know that when we go into these places, it's with the utmost respect," Siedlikowski said.

Urban explorers are 'a pain in the butt'

Using the word "respect" might seem rich, especially when legally speaking what urbexers do is wrong, but London police rarely lay criminal charges, even though the potential is always there. 

To count as a federal crime, police say the individual in question would have to have an intention of wrongdoing, either by stealing copper pipes, spray painting the walls or damaging the building in some way. 

Urban explorers often live by the credo "take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints" and as romantic as that sounds, it's still a potential ticket for trespassing. 

"They're a pain in the butt," said James Hind, the London Fire Department's inspector in charge of fire patrolling and curating the city's list of 100-plus vacant buildings on a monthly basis. 

McCormick's has its own Instagram tag

"They're putting themselves at risk, all for cheap thrills, for a selfie. Everything you're doing for a picture, you're putting police, fire and EMS at risk," he said.

While they claim to have noble intentions, urban explorers are only adding to the problem, according to city officials. 

Vacant buildings strain city resources in a number of ways. They're not just a fire risk by arsonists, they're used by squatters, or as a dumping grounds for debris, or as a place of refuge for people using drugs. 

City officials won't identify which abandoned buildings are most popular among urban explorers because they don't want to encourage the practice, but it's easy to deduce. 

The former McCormick's building, for example, is among the most popular with the selfie crowd. Why else would "Old McCormick's factory" be a location tag on Instagram? The social media platform didn't exist until two years after the factory closed in 2008.

"If you're going to film a horror move, that's the best place to do it," Hind said. "There are so many unsafe things in that building. Every time I go inside I'm surprised I haven't found anyone passed away in that building."

No lack of potential death traps

While firefighters haven't found anyone dead inside London's vacant buildings within recent memory, it's not for a lack of potential death traps. 

In fact, Hind said firefighters will regularly mark buildings with a red "X" to tell each other about the potential hazards inside, be they collapsed roofs, rotten floors, flooding or loose wires. Several vacant homes on Richmond Street north of the university gates visibly display the scarlet symbols in their front windows as a warning to first responders. 

"[They mean] you don't go in if you don't have to," he said. 

Except when you're in the business of fighting fires, that's not always an option. It's why Hind and company do regular fire patrols, looking for any visual signs that someone may have broken into abandoned buildings all over the city. 

"If a place hasn't been broken into, then we know that there's no-one inside," he said. "If a place has been broken into and you roll up and there's a fire, now you have a risk of someone being inside and the added risk of having to send someone inside." 

A perfect world for Hind would include beefing up the rules around how far landlords go in terms of keeping people out of vacant buildings and higher fines for some landlords who leave their buildings to deteriorate in an act known as demolition by neglect. 

"We have some people, their vacant buildings are a constant problem. I don't understand the legalities of leaving a building to rot," he said. "It's not fair that you walk away or turn your back on a building because you plan on developing it 10 years from now. There has to be some onus on the owners to maintain them."