Property poor in cottage country: Why legacy landowners can't keep their land

financialpost.com:

PORT CARLING, Ont. — Gord Carr set some old family photos on a wooden counter inside the Carr Greenhouse on Carr Road, a garden centre on the periphery of Port Carling, Ont. It was a sweltering Sunday afternoon in prime Ontario cottage country, doubly so inside the greenhouse, where Carr and his younger sister and business partner Leslie and their respective common-law spouses, Heidi Berninger and Kevin Broad, were doing what they typically do 10 or more hours a day, seven days a week, during the tourism high season: working.

“We can’t afford to stop,” Carr said.

Port Carling is a gateway to lakes Rosseau, Muskoka and Joseph, collectively known as the Muskokas, and sensationally known in media headlines as the “Hamptons of the North,” since the freshwater and pine tree paradise is frequented by the rich, and occasionally famous, some of whom arrive at their waterfront mansions aboard float planes or, more lately, helicopters, and are met by a five-star meal prepared by a personal chef.

But right alongside them are the cash-strapped, unsung locals. People like the Carrs, a fifth-generation Port Carling family, with black-and-white photos depicting the pioneering family members who came before them, not to build palatial vacation homes, mind you, but to carve a living from the northern woods.

Theirs is a much grittier tale of survival, one that doesn’t include a personal chef. District of Muskoka figures show that about 60 per cent of the region’s year-round population of 66,000 or so earn less than $50,000 a year. Year-round employment is hard to find, and even if there were good-paying jobs in abundance, housing is scarce and well beyond the reach of most young families.

The twist in this narrative of opulence in the