While real estate in the City of Cleveland falls apart vacant and ransacked of any type of metal - copper, cast iron, steel, aluminum, brass (water meters go first), in Toronto, Ontario, Canada you can't get a house for under $400,000 - and you always have to bid above the asking price- or you are wasting your time.

There are a few interesting avenues of inquiry here:  one would be why are houses in Toronto desireable while houses in Cleveland are demolished by Lightening Demolition at taxpayer expense?   a second question would be why houses in Toronto sell above asking price and how the market- brokers, sellers, executors, buyers, inspectors - operates to reach sales prices above the asking price!

I don't have the (final)  answers to either of these questions, but I believe both situations are whacked and in both there is a need for civic involvement to create a healthy market.   And maybe, just maybe, the civic involvement doesn't have to be legislative (read regulatory) involvement.   Maybe the internet can create an open data base which will improve the fairness, honesty, and efficiency of the market.

As to the "narrow" deal - almost all the older housing in municipal Toronto are rowhouses - many with common walls.   Almost all of these row houses are very narrow by Ohio community standards.  16 feet wide, even 15 feet wide.   A 20 foot wide unit is huge!

But then, against the backdrop of Shell stripping oil from the arctic, and every coal fired electric clothes dryer pumping scented drier sheets out the exhaust into the neighborhood - all talk, all conversation, all planning is fools work. 

While corporations sell us every type of crap we didn't need before, and they run their well funded pacs in DC, and every congressman and senator sucks it up for the special deal - what's the point in figuring out how/why you are screwed in Cleveland or screwed in Toronto?