A recent set of
statistics published on the real estate site Zoocasa has attracted a fair amount of
attention in the media
and ultimately even in Thunder
Bay. The data for these Ontario
municipalities includes the property tax rate, the average value of homes and
tax calculations for some standardized home values ranging from $250,000 to
$1,000,000 dollars. The highlight of the
data is of a course a ranking of property tax rates across 35 Ontario
municipalities and the illustration that property tax rates in Windsor are the
highest in the province and those in Toronto are the lowest with Thunder Bay
coming in at second highest.
Of course, how you
rank these tax burdens – especially when we are discussing property taxes in
say Thunder Bay or Sudbury compared to southern Ontario cities – can lead to
different answers. In the end, much depends
if you want to rank tax rates, the average taxes paid based on average property
values, taxes paid per standardized house values or property taxes as a share
of resources available – for example household income. There are two components to calculating a
simple estimate of property taxes paid – the value of the home and the tax rate
applied. Using the tax and property value data from Zoocasa and household income
data from the BMA 2019 report, here are some of the rankings in visual form.
First, Figure 1 plots
average house values ranked from highest to lowest for the 35 Ontario municipalities. The prices range from a high of $1.08 million
dollars in Richmond Hill to a low of just under $189,000 for Sault Ste.
Marie. Not surprisingly, houses in the
GTA area have the higher values while the four northern Ontario cities in the
data are all at the bottom. Sharing the
bottom with northern Ontario cities are other places that have been relatively
economically depressed in recent years – Windsor, London, St. Catharines.
