Development Rumours

[OliverD]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

Sounds like an interesting side effect to this system would be to force retired people back into the workforce if they don’t meet the criteria for the deferral. So either they take a job from a younger person or if nobody wants to hire them because of their age, they have the choice of being financially forced out of their home by the government, or making other tough choices like groceries etc? All because somebody in government made the choice to flood the country with a huge population increase and artificially create a housing crisis which blew up home values?

So Canadians who want to buy their first homes are forced out of the market, and people whose home values skyrocketed while they were just living their lives are suddenly faced with untenable tax costs to reflect “fair market value” in the environment of everything else literally doubling in price. Meanwhile the folks at the top continue along unscathed while those of us in the middle to the bottom (hint: the middle and the bottom are becoming one and the same) are squabbling amongst themselves about who does or doesn’t have the right to have a decent place to live, and a reasonable quality of life. Think about it.

The first rebuttal will be “well they can just sell their homes and reap the rewards of the value - they are wealthy people”…. People just want to live in their homes, and had a reasonable plan to stay in the home they wanted to as long as they can until the world went crazy around them. Now they are being told that they don’t deserve to be able to do that because the government fucked over the younger generations. That is wrong, and the government needs to fix it, but the answer is not to force seniors out of their homes, or force them to apply for what amounts to social assistance and a lien on their home to (maybe) allow them to stay there. IMHO the government’s responsibility is to tax reasonably, and be fiscally responsible with the tax that is given to them. None of this has happened in the past 10+ years, and it sounds like many of us are on board with it not happening in the near future. It’s sad, actually.

Another question: So we remove caps (HRM has already decided to increase the tax rate with the caps btw), and force people to apply for deferrals, thus all homes are taxed based upon “fair market value” from now on. The city suddenly has a huge increase in their budget to do ‘whatever’ with. What happens if/when home values decrease due to supply/demand relaxing, etc? They will have to make up for the decreased tax income… do they adjust for a lower budget, or do they increase tax rates to keep the same cash flow coming in? What do you think will happen here?

I’ll wrap up my opinion by saying that I don’t have much confidence that Halifax politicians have the ability to manage any of this in an efficient, reasonable manner. YMMV.

I don't think it would be tenable for the city to simply absorb an increase in budget. Perhaps this is an area where the province needs to step in and ensure that the tax rate is decreased to offset homes being taxed at their fair market value.

Regardless of the cap, we often hear fear mongering about property taxes forcing seniors out of their homes but I've yet to see much evidence of this actually happening. While I'm sure there may be some isolated incidents it isn't reasonable to presume that seniors en masse have an affordability crisis that differs from that of the working class especially when the average Canadian man aged 25-34 makes less than the average man over 65 (source).

While I don't think we should explicitly incentivize seniors to leave their homes we also should not incentivize (subsidize) them to stay via property tax breaks. If people want to stay in their family homes well past retirement that is fine but it isn't as common as it once was to own only a single home in one's lifetime, and I think people are more amenable to downsizing as they age. I've seen several examples of this in my own life recently. I think this is why it's important we build a healthy mix of housing options with both rental and ownership opportunities – give seniors downsizing options that are aspirational and desirable.

I don't know what the answer to the cap system is but I do know that it's entirely inequitable to penalize people for moving, and to subsidize people that don't need those subsidies. It is entirely reasonable to implement mechanisms to help those homeowners who truly cannot afford their property taxes though.