Frequently Asked Questions
Toronto needs a Gentrification Tax to end the displacement of low-income people and stop homesellers from removing wealth from the communities that produced it. To do this the tax must create sufficient quantities of locally managed accessible housing, reduce local rents by increasing the supply of rental units and limit housing speculation.
When selling homes, homeowners and housing corporations often make a huge profits from values that they didn’t produce, this is called the “unearned increment”. It includes values that come from Indigenous Peoples (stolen land, land and water defense…), other local cultures (shops, music…), tenants (mutual aid, community gatherings…), non-profit initiatives (food co-ops, gardens…), land and water ecologies (pollinators, trees…), publicly funded infrastructure (libraries, public transit…). This value should be reinvested locally.
Gentrification Tax Action made the above posters in collaboration with Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust and Parkdale residents to highlight the value that is produced in the community and the necessity that it be reinvested in the community. These will be posted in Parkdale in the summer of 2023.
1 tax the increase in value of a home (after inflation), and
2 decline in percentage over a set number of years. (The longer a homeowner stays in the community, the less they pay, dis-incentivizing house flipping for profit.) And
3 directly fund local Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and housing cooperatives, ensuring that the profits of gentrification remain in the neighbourhood to create and maintain deeply affordable housing.
Explore the Gentrification Tax Calculator to see how much affordable housing could be created.
Tax funds would go directly to local Community Land Trusts (CLT) and housing cooperatives (rather than to the centralized City), ensuring that the profit from gentrification remains in the neighborhood to create and maintain deeply affordable locally managed housing.
In Toronto, The Neighbourhood Land Trust (NLT) is a not-for-profit charitable organization that owns and manages land in a community ownership model. NLT partners with qualified charitable social housing partners, who then provide high quality affordable housing, supportive housing, and community economic development programs. NLT is dedicated to ensuring the perpetual affordability of all properties which it owns. The NLT is the charitable arm of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT), based in Toronto’s Parkdale community.
In 2023, Toronto-based firm Levitt Goodman Architects collaborated with PNLT to design an example of how Gentrification Taxes could fund the purchase and renovation of mid rise apartments in Parkdale, for locally-managed, deeply affordable housing in an area of intense gentrification.
The campaign for a Gentrification Tax was initiated in 2019 by Gentrification Tax Action (a group of local artists and residents) and continues to grow through collaborations with the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT) and Levitt Goodman Architects.