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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (206454)	10/18/2006 5:49:32 PM
From: Ichy Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Obviously we are not communicating very well. as I understand it your mortgage payment is tax deductible, ours isn't. Our property taxes are paid to the local government. BUT the liberals a few years ago downloaded a heap of tax onto the province. The province downloaded onto the cities. Then they put on Market Value assessment. For most people their house is their biggest investment. With market value assessment if there is a large increase in the price of housing, the value of your house goes up. So if your neighbour fixes up his house and sells it, your taxes go up. But the value to you, only goes up when you sell. Taxes have doubled in 10 or so years, and some charges that were on the tax bill were offloaded to other bills. So water bills went way up. In order to protect the poor, Ontario has a cap on rent increases, and Rental housing is hugely difficult to sell. It isn't economical to own rental housing that does not produce more income than the equivalent income from banks or other income producing venues. But you are limited in what you can raise the rent to 2% a year. So you cannot raise taxes to cover the increase in your costs, remember Electricity has doubled, oil is way up. Since they downloaded welfare costs to the property taxes, and various other things property taxes have doubled. The higher property taxes go, the higher your incidence of homelessness. This is one of the reasons governments talk subsidized housing but do nothing about it. No Government will commit to something where they have no control of the costs. And the only governments that could support subsidized housing Federal and provincial governments, have no control over property taxes. So you see more and more apartment buildings being vacated for a year (it takes a year of being empty to qualify for conversion to a condo)and then the buildings are renovated, and sold as Condos. The builder raises the value, but the new owners pay the taxes. Poor people need not apply.