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Single-family homeowners will see the regional tax burden shift slightly towards them

December 30th, 2015 · 8 Comments

Catching up on posting my stories here. This one from a few days ago, about the impact that the big spike in assessments will have for single-family homeowners.

There was some reaction on Twitter that, boohoo, these people making hundreds of thousands in real-estate profits should pay up without griping. So this is just a reminder that many, many people in the region don’t plan to sell, don’t plan to cash in, but have suddenly found their rather modest homes suddenly pushed up the value scale because of a few sales in their neighbourhoods. (I’ve heard of more than a few around Main and Fraser who got the letters saying their assessments will likely to be up by more than 25 per cent.)

For some, it will just mean paying a bigger tax increase than their condo neighbours. For others, it will mean that, plus losing part or all of their $570 ($770 for seniors) homeowner grant. You start losing it gradually as your house value goes past $1.1 million, according to the current regulations. Weirdly, the province actually lowered the limit from $1.3 million a couple of years ago.

As noted in the story, Burnaby council has already written to the B.C. Assessment Authority, suggesting that assessment values simply be frozen for this year.

Expect to hear more about this, as people start to figure out what the exact impact of the shift is.

 

 

 

Categories: Uncategorized

  • guanolad

    Interesting story. Is there an alternative to “tax burden” in the headline? “Balance of taxes”? Property taxes pay for essential services that are the opposite of a “burden” for me. I would much rather pay into a common pool of taxes, spread over the population, rather than try to buy more expensive private services as an individual. “Tax burden” plays into the general sense that taxes are bad, full stop, and the only tax “reform” that we need is to lower them. And we see where that has led us, e.g. the latest transit referendum…

  • Internet made me obsolete

    Burden or duty, either way if they continue to increase the day will come that some cynical, sleaze-ball politician will ride a small-government, tax-cutting policy into office. It worked again and again in the USofA to the extent that the Harper Conservatives tried it here. Even the Trudeau government promised a middle-class tax cut, financed by borrowing. Good time to invest in bank shares.
    Of course it leads to the municipal bankruptcies like those in California, where cities have had to lay off fire, police and admin to pay the pensions of retired employees and service their debts. Unfortunately the only solution is to raise taxes and nobody is going to run on that.

  • A Taxpayer

    Actually, the municipal bankruptcies were caused by the unaffordable pensions given to the municipal workers by irresponsible politicians but don’t let the facts get in the way of your progressive mythology.

    http://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/how-bloated-public-pensions-sank-californias-bankrupt-cities

  • A Taxpayer

    Residential property owners have a legitimate beef with the Provincial government as reducing the threshold for the Homeowners Grant is nothing but an out and out tax grab. Perhaps this is the price we pay for having a mayor who never misses an opportunity to play partisan politics with Victoria. And it probably didn’t help that the champagne socialists of Vancouver-Point Grey voted to turf out Christie Clark in the last provincial election.

    The mayor’s calling for a change in the calculation of property taxes for certain properties that experienced a significant increase in assessed value is not justified. Property value assessments are used to apportion the total tax bill so it is a zero sum game – reducing the property taxes on some properties means everyone else will pay more. This is not equitable and the only reason the mayors would make such a suggestion is that they are afraid that taxpayers will wake up if they get hit with a large increase and finally realize that their elected representatives have not done a satisfactory job of containing municipal costs.

  • Internet made me obsolete

    Me:”lay off fire, police and admin to pay the pensions of retired employees and service their debts”
    You:”the unaffordable pensions given to the municipal workers”

    Progressive mythology?

  • A Taxpayer

    You linked the municipal bankruptcies to tax cuts. I said they were due to unaffordable pension benefits. I provided a reference to support my comment. You didn’t.

    Here is a bonus reference

    https://www.pacificresearch.org/fileadmin/documents/Studies/PDFs/2013-2015/MunicipalBankruptcy2014_F.pdf

  • Internet made me obsolete

    “Without the legacy of a limitation on local tax increases (e.g. Proposition 13), there would be no municipal fiscal crisis”

    http://www.irle.ucla.edu/publications/documents/ResearchBrief21.pdf

  • A Taxpayer

    You omitted the end of the quote “as we know it today.”

    The other cities in the study all experienced a financial crisis but were able to raise additional revenue from property taxes without the constraints of California’s Proposition 13. The study says nothing about whether the pensions or other public sector compensation was sustainable.

    You may very well take the position that the California cities would have avoided bankruptcy if they were unconstrained in their ability to levy property taxes. However, it is equally true that if they had been more responsible in their agreements public sector unions then they would have also avoided bankruptcy without raising property taxes.