Yonge St. is noteworthy for the small businesses and lowrise heritage buildings that have defined Canada’s Main Street for decades. Hobby shops, bookstores, and owner-operated restaurants have made it a destination and precisely why we have wound-up in a terrible paradox.

For years, developers have been assembling properties, tearing down the old character buildings and constructing massive new condominiums. And now, after years’ of intensive planning policy work to protect the neighbourhood, it has been hit from another angle — property taxes.

Today, walking down from Bloor along Yonge, there are signs up in many of the windows declaring a tax revolt. I have never shied away from my position that Toronto’s taxes need to cover the services supporting the long-term success of its residents. However, the 400 per cent increase that some owners face is not only unacceptably high for them, it undermines all the recent planning work that has been done to keep the neighbourhood vital.

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The policy gaps that existed for Yonge St. when I came into office in 2010 was massive. However, the community was mobilized from Bay St. to Church St. with residents, property owners, and businesses wanting to do their part to support the character of their neighbourhood.

That meant years of catch-up planning work and the drafting of two major area specific policies to limit heights and maintain the public realm, a Heritage Conservation District to preserve the heritage assets of the street, and an Official Plan amendment to prevent new developments for creating a visual wall on Yonge St.

Now, as we wait on the Ontario Municipal Board to authorize the last pieces of those plans, another provincial agency has thrown a curveball that could undermine it all.

In 1998, the Province of Ontario changed how its agent, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC), calculate properties’ current value assessment (CVA), using a common valuation date.‎ In the GTA, with an abundance of real estate transactions, MPAC uses the direct sales comparison approach to calculate property assessments. Any MPAC valuation process always begins with a determination of the “highest and best use” of the property, which on Yonge St., it seems that the assessors have determined it to be super tall condominium building.

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As a result of this blunt application of the CVA methodology, MPAC is using the direct sales comparison of Yorkville’s 1 Bloor West development project at the corner of Yonge St. to forecast the highest and best use for every other commercial building on Yonge St. This approach contributes to a speculative real estate market where projected future values appear to be reported by MPAC as current values.

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That is what has happened this year and Yonge St. owners are going to be face a terrible choice if we do not act — pass on the unpayable rate to their tenants through commercial leases or sell their lots to developers to avoid further losses.

Last week, I brought Yonge St. property owners and business operators to a meeting with MPAC representatives and we made our case. Shortly into the meeting MPAC announced its intention to reassess the disputed properties in the Heritage Conservation District and to have amended property assessment notices mailed to the owners in September.

In conversation, there was admission that MPAC may not have taken into consideration the entire planning regime of the historic street and it pledged to another look. This modest victory represents a temporary measure with yet-to-be-determined tax relief results. As one would expect, this positive announcement was met with cautious appreciation by those in attendance.

In the long-run, MPAC needs to expand its valuation approach to more accurately reflect the actual use of a property to determine a truer current value assessment. MPAC’s broad sweeping CVA approach fuels unchecked development and unintentionally destroys character neighbourhoods as we know them.

We need the province to work with the city to create a new property classification that effectively preserves independent businesses and small commercial retail properties, such as the 2- to 3-storey buildings that line almost every single street in Toronto.

We must not force out the very people who made Yonge St. a success in the first place. If we do not see action here and now, this sorry lesson will be forced upon every neighbourhood intensifying in the GTA.