Death, taxes and luxury

Who’s the city for? Those who live here, or those who visit and the power-brokers who feed off them?

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Death

As the saying goes, ”the poor will always be with us.” But why do they have to make such a mess of things, even in death? Here we are, not having even entered the coldest days of winter, and already two poor people go and die in terribly public ways. The incorrigible ingrates!

On November 30, Saanich police officer Brad Brajcich found the frozen body of 62 year old Thomas Bernard Mather. The body was “covered in snow and half under a tarp in the bushes” of a park, according to the Victoria Times Colonist. Then, a few days later during the same cold snap, a homeless, wheelchair-bound native man, Frank McAllister, died of exposure in the downtown Hastings area, his body prostrate on the frozen sidewalk. A spokesperson for the BC Ambulance Service said they’d attended a “911” call for help to assist the man at 11:30 p.m. the evening before his death, but McAllister had refused the ride to the hospital. What can you do? He could have gone nice and quietly in a hospital bed, but oh no, this ungracious man had to draw attention to himself.

According to Constable Brajcich, “we talk to them and make sure they’re o.k., but you have to keep in mind that a lot of these people . . . want to be living where they are living.” If you believe that, you’ve been reading, listening or watching the corporate media too much. Henry George had a better grip on it 135 years ago when he said, “It is a universal fact that where the value of land is the highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution. To see human beings in the most abject, the most helpless and hopeless condition, you must go, not to the unfenced prairies, . . . but to the great cities where the ownership of a little patch of ground is a fortune.”

Taxes

It’s great to have the NPA back in power! They’re so predictable. It hardly took a week for Peter Ladner to start drumming for redistributing the tax load once again. The city has used the tax system to redistribute wealth upward in two different ways: first, by dropping the proportion of taxes paid by commercial property owners relative to residential property owners; and second, by redistributing taxes among taxpayers.

Since at least the early 1980s, the city has agonized on how to lift the tax burden from the backs of commercial property taxpayers and onto the backs of residential property owners. VancouverSun reporter Frances Bula wrote that, between 1993 and 2000, the NPA had shifted the proportion of taxes paid by businesses to homeowners five times. In 1993, homeowners paid 39% of the total tax bill, and by 2000, their portion amounted to 46% of the bill. The NPA argue that commercial property holders pay a disproportionate amount of taxes when compared to other cities. At about the same time, a Sun editorial pointed out that the tax bill for residential property owners in the GVRD averaged 60% of the total bill.

It is a weak argument however, because commercial properties in the city, especially in the downtown, benefit from huge public investments that pull monied customers to them. Can Port Coquitlam, Maple Ridge or Abbotsford claim to have the huge draws, e.g. art galleries, theatres, sports events, huge international hotels and large entertainment industry that benefits the commercial property owners in the downtown core?

In a telephone interview, a former COPE candidate who specialized in questions of city taxation, Mike Walker, told The Republic that it is misleading to represent commercial property owners as a relatively homogenous group with similar interests. He pointed out the classification “commercial property owners,” includes “huge downtown property owners like the owners of the Bentall Centre, while it also includes every 20-foot-wide shop all the way down Fraser Street.”

It is deceiving to speak about supporting local business owners, while grouping together the giant with the tiny property owners. Walker said, “If you reduce commercial property taxes you should try to focus it on small locally-owned businesses,” otherwise the huge corporations will benefit disproportionately. Walker suggested a form of a tax rebate targeted at small business might be able to do the trick.

At the same time, the NPA redistributed taxes among residential property owners themselves. The NPA sought to mitigate the effect of exploding property assessments on west side property owner’s tax loads. At the time the NPA played on the image of the nice elderly retired couple who had found their property assessments go through the roof and with them, their tax burden. As Walker says, the value of one’s property, as tied up in personal housing, is not a reliable indicator of wealth. Still, once again the tax system could accommodate anomalies (e.g. retired people who sit on expensive property, despite being on low incomes).

The key redistributive change occurred in 1996, when, after years of planning, the NPA put in place a mechanism that massively redistributed the tax load from owners of expensive $500,000 to $1 million west side homes to $200,000 to $350,000 (at that time) east side homes. The NPA appropriated the Thatcherite language of “user-fees,” i.e. they created new charges for property owners to mask their actions, as they took from the middle and gave to the wealthier. The NPA savaged what progressivity remained in the property tax system. The NPA invented fees for sewage, garbage and blue box removal, services that had previously been included in the general property tax charges.

The effect? In Shaugnessy, the tax bill fell by 11%, in Marpole by 12%, in West Point Grey and Dunbar areas by 6% and 7% respectively. These areas, pockets of greatest family wealth in Vancouver, “coincidentally” doubled as bastions of NPA support. Meanwhile, on the Eastside, Grandview Woodland’s tax bill rose 28%, parts of Mt. Pleasant by 30%, and the northeast corner of the city rose by 22%.

Luxury

More and more, “world class cities” are the stage for a variety of types of packaged luxury entertainment products: artistic, theatrical, athletic, musical. Once again we are being told we need a new stadium, this time for soccer. Why? The city is littered with the corpses of giant, ugly stadiums. Empire Stadium (now deconstructed), Nat Bailey Stadium, Swangard Stadium, the Agrodome, the Pacific Coliseum, BC Place, General Motors Place: all sit empty and unused most of the year. Consider the history of GM Place, which sits like a giant wart on the side of the spectacularly ugly BC Place, is instructive. In Slam Dunk, Brendan Connor and Nancy Russell tell the story of that stadium’s origins. The Pacific Coliseum, situated 20 kilometres from the downtown core, “was unsuited to the revenue stream [Art Griffith’s] company needed to continue to operate the hockey team efficiently.” The Coliseum “only seated” 15,000 and “luxury box space is limited . . . and as a tenant, the team’s ownership group, North West Sports Enterprises, got no cut of the parking and concession fees.” So it was the economics of luxury consumption—profits from parking, concessions, and especially luxury box suites—and the need to relocate to the city core, that gave birth to the stadium.

Almost all stadiums and convention centres and theatres are built with huge public subsidies (GM Place is the exception here—one journalist clamed it was the first stadium since the 1930s built entirely with private funds). Look at the short life of the now-vacant Ford Centre for the Performing Arts. The provincial government guaranteed a $5.25 million commercial mortgage of the total $24.5 million cost of construction, over 20% of the total cost. Three fluffy productions later —Showboat, Sunset Boulevard and Phantom of the Opera—and it closed. The centre was part of a string of theatres under the stewardship of Canadian arts entrepreneur Garth Drabinsky and his Livent Corporation, each of them heavily subsidized by various levels of government. Right wing pundit Terence Corcoran hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “For all its show biz claims to theatrical daring and entrepreneurial flair, Livent was essentially a real restate speculation, built with taxpayer support. Behind the glitz, Livent worked the local political angles, fixed tax deals and collected favours, each theatre a triumph of Livent’s political deal-making”.

These products are geared solely to well-heeled local residents and tourists. With expensive public-private investments in city centres, local cultural activity, i.e. that which has an organic relationship with citizens’ daily lives, gets evicted from city centres simply because the huge investments translate into astronomical land prizes, which in turn filters to the street as prohibitively expensive overhead costs—rents, taxes and services. Culture that originates at corporate headquarters is dead on arrival. Look at corporate rock, Hollywood productions and glittering international art exhibitions. Instead of subsidizing luxury consumption, governments should put their money—that is, our money—into local sports and local music and arts programs that cultivate local artistic, musical and athletic culture, not simply fatten multinational corporate coffers.

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