Undeclared homes clustered downtown
Heat map shows most of 4,000 properties in Yaletown, Coal Harbour and West End
NICK EAGLAND
The Province
The City of Vancouver released a heat map Thursday showing the distribution of residential properties where owners haven’t yet made a declaration to avoid its new empty-homes tax, and the highest concentration is in condo-rich Yaletown.
The city says about 182,000 residential property owners — roughly 98 per cent — have submitted their declarations but another 4,000 still haven’t. Most of the undeclared properties are in the downtown core and the highest concentrations are in Yaletown, Coal Harbour and the West End.
Homeowners in the three condo-dense neighbourhoods who have not declared occupancy risk paying a one per cent tax on their properties’ assessed values. Assessed values of residential strata units — such as condos — in Metro Vancouver skyrocketed this year by five to 35 per cent.
Residential property owners had until Feb. 2 to declare occupancy, but the city extended the deadline to March 5 to give the 4,000 who had not declared a chance to avoid penalties and fines.
The empty-homes tax, a first in Canada, was approved by councillors in 2016 as a tool to spur owners to rent out empty homes. Any property owner who fails to declare by March 5 is subject to the tax plus a $250 fee.
Declarations will be subject to an audit process and false declarations could result in fines of up to $10,000 per day, according to the city.
“With a near-zero vacancy rate in Vancouver, our key goal is to shift empty or underused housing into the rental market. The city has done extensive advertising and notifications about the empty homes tax for more than a year — all homeowners should know that they have to file a declaration, or their homes will be considered empty by default,” Mayor Gregor Robertson said in a news release.
Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s city program, who has been researching the distribution of empty homes in Vancouver, said the city’s heat map matches well with a map he generated from city data identifying private dwellings not occupied by usual residents. It also matches closely with a map of population density he prepared based on 2016 census data.
But Yan questions whether the city will have any luck collecting declarations from the 4,000 property owners represented in its heat map. He believes some owners may not understand the implications of non-filing, may decline to respond as form of protest or simply may not have received notices because the homes are, in fact, unoccupied.
“Are these people even home? Is there even somebody to receive the notice: ‘Are you an empty home?’ ” he said. “This could potentially show where the really, really empty homes are.”
Yan said he hopes the city will release a comprehensive map of empty homes once they have been identified.
The latest census counted more than 25,500 empty homes in Vancouver. That amounts to more than eight per cent of the city’s total housing stock. Meanwhile, the rental vacancy rate rests just above zero.
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