Opinion: What a property tax freeze doesn't tell us

Recently, a family member told me about a survey on municipal taxation. Would they prefer to freeze their property taxes, even if it meant reducing services, or pay more to maintain them? They chose the freeze. Their child had grown older and no longer needed the community centre camps and recreational programs the family once relied on.

It’s an understandable answer. But the question assumed a freeze means fewer services and an increase means keeping them. Neither is necessarily true.

It’s also the choice behind a familiar election promise. ABC Vancouver has again pledged a zero property tax increase for 2027. What would that actually mean? Vancouver’s last freeze offers a clue. In November 2025, council approved a $2.39 billion operating budget with no increase in the property tax rate. Balancing it, the city said, required $120 million in savings and new revenue.

Yet total operating revenue was budgeted to rise by about $50 million, including $9.3 million more in property tax revenue and higher parking, program and bylaw-fine revenues. Average utility charges rose 4.2 per cent — about $107 for a single-family home, which the city attributed to aging pipes and higher regional water and sewer levies.

Property taxes make up only about 56 per cent of the city’s operating revenue, according to a recent report from the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance. The rest comes from utility charges, fees, parking and other sources, so a city can freeze one while raising others. Its Property Endowment Fund contribution to operations has also grown from $9 million in 2022 to $23 million in 2026.

A frozen rate, in other words, is not frozen revenue, let alone frozen cost. It doesn’t tell us whether costs have fallen, risen or simply moved elsewhere.

Costs rarely stand still. Collective agreements set wages, buildings need maintenance, and even holding service levels steady can require more spending. That spending deserves scrutiny. Vancouver’s inflation-adjusted operating expenditures grew by an average of 2.2 per cent a year between 2010 and 2024, while population grew 1.4 per cent. The figures can’t say whether that reflects inefficiency, changing standards or new responsibilities, but they justify asking.

Holding the line takes some mix of efficiencies, spending reductions, alternative revenues and changed plans. These are not interchangeable. A library that buys supplies more cheaply has found an efficiency. One that closes an extra day a week has cut a service. A city that coordinates road reconstruction with underground utility work may save money. One that postpones necessary maintenance may simply be sending the bill to the future.

That risk is greatest where nobody is looking. Consider the water main beneath your street. You turn on the tap and expect clean water, but you rarely think about the pipe. According to the city’s 2027–2030 Capital Plan, keeping existing infrastructure in good condition requires about $800 million a year, but only about $300 million is available through property taxes and utility fees, leaving an annual gap of about $500 million. The auditor general has found 72 per cent of recreation facilities in poor or very poor condition.

Residents notice a new community centre, not a replaced sewer pipe, which is partly why maintenance is easy to put off. A freeze may coexist with continued investment, or it may mean deferring it. The headline figure can’t tell us which. The same plan shows the city’s own share of capital funding rising from 59 per cent to 73 per cent, partly through borrowing, which carries costs forward.

ABC’s platform pairs the freeze with elimination of residential parking permit fees and paid parking at beaches and community centres, while investing in infrastructure.

Scrapping a fee helps those who pay it, but it also removes revenue. The city’s June 2026 Budget Outlook, meanwhile, anticipates utility fee increases of about six to seven per cent a year over five years, and four to five per cent for cost-recovery services. Those are projections, not approved rates, but they show what the next council will inherit.

So the question isn’t whether a freeze is attractive. It’s how the commitments fit together.

How much of the promised savings would recur? Which alternative revenues would replace forgone taxes and fees? Would current service levels hold? And what do the numbers look like over several years rather than a single budget cycle?

These questions apply to any council proposing a freeze, just as questions about affordability and priorities apply to one proposing increases. An increase doesn’t guarantee better services, and a freeze doesn’t necessarily mean worse ones. Both have to be judged against what the city collects, how well it spends, and what obligations it carries forward.

When I think back to my family member’s answer, what interests me isn’t the choice they made but how the questions invited them to make it, from the standpoint of their household today. Cities work on a longer timeline. Children grow up, families move, and public facilities serve successive generations who had no say in whether they were built. Every generation inherits both the benefits and the bills.

Understanding a freeze doesn’t require everyone to agree about how much tax they should pay. It requires recognizing that the city we pay for is much larger than the portion of it we happen to use.

Erick Villagomez is a lecturer in the school of community and regional planning at the University of B.C.