Comment 54234

By wentworthst (anonymous) | Posted January 01, 2011 at 18:23:01

Please don't think this is a rant, just a report of experience.

We moved from an older area of Burlington and really do love it here... We found great people, and Cathy Wever is a fantastic PS (thank you to Tim Simmons, our HWDSB vice-chair).

But we discovered a semantical problem; people that could afford to live here, can't get a mortgage here.

19 out of 20 lenders turned us down. Most said, "its not you, its anything near Barton St in Hamilton"-- they advised we pick again, anything well away from Ward 3.

We found a loan-- took the hit on %, but the mortgage is 5-digits so not a big deal for us at year-end. Then we even struggled to close the deal because of Fire Insurance... Nobody wanted to write it; in the end we pay 2 to 3 times what we have in the past.

People with modest credit can look at Ward 3 and say what we did... The net hit on the mortgage rate is actually paid for by jokingly low property taxes. People with weak credit can't get approved; people with good credit likely don't want to live here... And that's residential, not $10's of millions to risk on commercial, which isn't beating down our door as it is.

IMHO, the social cost of the inner wards plus the property assessment is killing our whole city, at least budget-wise. We don't just spend more on the poverty that ends up here from everywhere else but we also extract nothing from it in taxes due to absurdly low property value for a Canadian city.

Why is this all relevant? Because all plans determine where the Future Fund goes and we should be considering how big a bill we will see for an Ivor Wynne clean-up, no matter what happens now.

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