Victoria council wants the province to give all B.C. municipalities authority to impose extra taxes on vacant and derelict properties to help increase housing affordability.
Councillors agreed Thursday with Ben Isitt’s and Jeremy Loveday’s motion that Victoria send the idea to the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities and the Union of B.C. Municipalities for support.
“This motion doesn’t propose that we bring in this tax, it simply asks that we ask the province to give us the authority to decide whether or not to do that,” said Isitt.
Vancouver has an Empty Homes Tax of one per cent of a property’s assessed value on homes deemed to be vacant. Revenues go to affordable housing initiatives.
The Vancouver tax does not apply to principal residences or homes rented on a long-term basis of at least six months.
Coun. Geoff Young was the only one to vote against the measure, saying he worried about the “intrusiveness of the enforcement that would be required.”
“I have no doubt that if we put an ad in the paper, we would receive hundreds of tips from people who suspect their neighbours of being away and we could implement investigations by our staff,” Young said.
Young said while there are some people holding units vacant for speculative reasons, there already are disincentives for them to do that such as the cost of utilities not being used and ineligibility for the homeowner grant.
Mayor Lisa Helps said she is not interested in taxing people away from their homes which would be “woefully unfair.”
“I don’t think we should do a vacant home tax, but I do think we need the authority to tax derelict buildings. They are vacant and derelict. They are very easy to identify. They have fences around them. They’re boarded up. They’re eyesores. They’re unsafe.
“That’s what . . . we need to ask the province for.”
Coun. Margaret Lucas, who supported the idea of taxing derelict properties, said she did not want to see “neighbour pitted against neighbour.”
“That does not build community and it ruins neighbourhoods.”
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. has estimated the rental vacancy rate in Victoria at about 0.6 per cent, but there is no firm data on the number of housing units being left empty.
In a related move, councillors supported Young’s suggestion that they lobby the province to restore municipalities’ authority to introduce a land-value tax.
Such a tax would see property taxes weighed more heavily on the land rather than improvements such as buildings in setting taxes.
“When we tax improvements, we’re discouraging people from making improvements; from maintaining their property. When we tax the land, we’re not discouraging anything because they can’t take the land away,” Young said.
“I’m certainly not suggesting that we are going to go back to the old ideal, a single tax where we only tax land or have it at very high levels. But it is perfectly practical — because B.C. Assessment Authority does assess land and buildings separately — to gradually increase the weight at which we’re taxing land and to decrease the weight that we give to the taxation of property,” he said.
