Quote:
Originally Posted by TheRitsman
I actually think the grant program should remain and be increased for areas of difficulty like Barton, Ottawa, and Concession. It costs us very little, and bring increased tax revenue for as long as the city will continue to exist. It's a smart program and it encourages further housing which is something we desperately need.
It will "cost" $5.6m in total, but the property will bring $240,000,000 in tax revenue over the next 100 years. And if we assume the city will be around until 3023, it will bring the city $2,400,000,000 over the next thousand years. It's in the city's best interest to spur dense development whether in a slump or not because the city isn't keeping up with it's maintenance costs, and to improve that balance in a sustainable way we need dense residential development, commercial development and industrial development. A good way to get that it to literally pay for it to be incentivized.
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perhaps - but at a certian point it starts being a giveaway to developers without really being needed to achieve it's goals.
It also has to be balanced with Hamilton's major problems with a poor tax base. Hamilton right now has a very below-average tax base compared to the costs it has to incur because of poor assessment values on properties in the lower city and a lack of a strong commercial tax base, which is why taxes are so high while services are relatively poor. Developments like this one will go a long way to improving this ($2.5 million is equivalent to 0.25% of the entire property tax base of the city in this project alone), and foregoing that revenue just compounds the issue.
It's a delicate balancing act of trying to encourage the creation of a stronger tax base and actually collecting on that tax base. Before, and maybe even still today, the tax break was needed to make projects work. Increasingly though, I wonder if the time is coming downtown where it's really not needed any more.
Unrelated, but I think a lot of people in the lower city are in for a shock whenever MPAC finally gets around to performing a reassessment. Lower city property values have skyrocketed (even more than elsewhere) since 2016, and I think reassessment will really help with Hamilton's tax base a lot as those properties will see much higher assessment values (and therefor taxes) following reassessment.
This house in Stoney Creek, sold for $675,000, pays $3,900 a year, while
this house in the north end, sold for $683,000, pays $2,628. And the lower city is supposed to have a higher mill rate, too! Basically, the north end property is underassessed by over 30%.
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