Letterbox: Port Moody needs more jobs, not fewer homes

Dear Editor,

The June 9 letter on rising tax bills (How Port Moody’s condo boom is leaving detached homeowners holding the bag) got the frustration right and the cause wrong. The fix for detached homeowners getting squeezed isn’t fewer homes. It’s more of what Port Moody barely has: commercial and industrial tax base.

Here’s the problem underneath this spring’s tax notices. Homeowners are carrying almost the entire load to begin with. Port Moody is a largely residential city. We’ve lost industrial tax base over the years, and the new development arriving is overwhelmingly residential too. Cities with a healthy mix of commercial and industrial property spread the cost of every road, park, and pipe across businesses as well as households. We don’t have that cushion, so any swing in residential values lands hard on residents.

And that’s all this spring’s spike really is. Property tax in B.C. works as a sliding scale: the city sets a budget, then divides it across all properties based on each one’s assessed value relative to the average. When one class loses value faster than another, the burden shifts toward whatever held its value. This year strata units fell faster than detached homes, so a larger slice landed on owners of detached houses even though their own assessments barely moved. Paul Rockwood, the city’s general manager of finance, said as much to this paper: as assessments change, the burden gets redistributed even when total taxes don’t rise, and it’s happening across the region.

So this isn’t a density scheme. It’s how the system works in every municipality with a single residential rate, and it would be happening whether or not a single tower went up. Blaming the towers misses the real lever.

The answer is to build the other side of the ledger. The Moody Centre TOD plan envisions roughly 2,000 jobs alongside the new housing. Commercial and office space generates tax at a higher rate per square foot than housing, and it only helps if it actually gets built and filled. The SkyTrain is here. The density is coming. The open question is whether we’re intentional about the employment space that shares the burden, or whether we let households keep doing the heavy lifting and act surprised when the bill arrives.

Aaron Demes
Port Moody resident