Recently the Cities plan to add a bus lane on Robie street has come under fire from groups like Friends of the Commons. The groups assert that the money being spent is wasteful, destroys affordable housing, removes heritage, and just generally will ruin the city. The friends of the commons social media posts against the bus lane generate comments like this:

The assertion being made is that the properties being acquired by the city for the bus lane, will then be sold off at a discount to developers. (this is bunk, as the HRM Charter precludes below market sales). He believes that he subsides Robie Street with his property taxes, and suggests we follow the money.

A quick google resulted in me finding the posters address. This led me to his street, which consists of 7 properties. Those 7 properties in 2024 generated a total of $26,681.90 in tax revenue for the city. This works out to be $3800/property, but as you can see there is alot of variation in taxes paid on the street.

In 2005, HRM had a report produced that estimated servicing costs based on certain development types. For our purposes I split the difference between the Rural Commuter “B” and “H” patterns, for a servicing cost of $4000/lot in 2005 dollars. Using the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, the 2024 servicing cost is $6013/property.

So our commenters street consumes $42,091 in city services, but only paid for $26,681 of that, leaving a shortfall of $15,410 to be made up by other parts of the city.

Using the same report, and Urban Pattern “G”, the 2024 servicing cost is $2173 on Robie Street. the 10 properties Between Columbus and Merkel generated $47,059 in tax revenue, but only consumed $21,730 in city services, resulting in a surplus of $25,329, more then enough to cover the shortfall from our commenters street, and still leaving $9919 left over for something else. I should also note that these 10 properties account for 19 units of housing.

So contrary to the commenters belief that he was subsiding Robie street, he was a net burden on HRMs finances to the tune of $2201 in 2024. That is money came from the urban core of the city.

The Properties being acquired on Robie street collectively paid about $166,000 in tax in 2024. As these properties get redeveloped into more dense projects, tax revenue for the city will also increase. for comparison, The Residential building on the Corner of Robie and Cunard paid $150,000 in property taxes in 2024.

References

I have made my 2024 HRM Tax data shapefile available at https://ziobrowski.net/opendata/ This data set combines the PVSC Parcel Land sizes Data set, with the NSPRD property polygons, and the SUM of all taxes per AAN (Assessment Account Number) from HRM’S 2024 property tax bill data.