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It’s a few minutes before 8 a.m. and about a dozen people are standing in the empty lot on the corner of 25th Street East and Second Avenue North, their shoes crunching the gravel and their shoulders hunched against a sharp September breeze.

Similar scenes play out every morning across downtown Saskatoon as people wait in line to pay a median of $150 per month to park their cars and trucks on the vacant lots that punctuate the city’s core.

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When the Patricia Hotel was torn down in 2013, its owners said they would wait until “the dust settles” before unveiling plans for a new development at the site.

Three years later, the lot on the corner of one of Saskatoon’s busiest intersections has been converted into a parking lot and its owners are still waiting for an opportunity to develop it. It could take time.

“I don’t think any big developers are really jumping at anything with the status of the way things are,” said David Bakonyi, a spokesman for the Vancouver-based investors who bought the hotel and bar before demolishing it weeks later.