The Tax Stack: Toronto, affordability problem or tax problem?

An Open Nshipyard civic data project. It tests the claim that Toronto does not have an affordability problem, only a tax problem, using open data only.

Headline finding: a tax problem inside an affordability problem. Government charges were about 25 to 30 percent of a new Toronto home's price at the 2024/2025 peak (30 percent on a worked two-bedroom condo example, 28 percent on a detached example). Remove every charge and a new detached house still costs about 8.9 times the median household income, against an affordable range of 3 to 4 times. A resale home in the same city carries about 3 percent tax and is also unaffordable.

The page walks through the worked tax stack (with toggles for the 2026 relief window), Toronto's development charge history ($4,795 in 1999 to $137,846 in 2024, then cut to $55,138 in 2026), the new-vs-resale tax wedge, the counterfactual, a nine-city CMHC comparison, where the charge goes by service, the 2026 policy test with predictions recorded in advance, and the data gaps found along the way. English and French throughout.

Live at: https://tax.canada.nshipyard.com

Screenshots

Run it

npm install
npm run dev

Production build: npm run build.

API: GET /api/stack returns the full dataset as JSON. GET /api/dc returns the city comparison rows.

Data

public/data/stack.json is the single verified dataset behind the site; components read the same content from src/lib/stack.ts. It holds the worked tax-stack prototypes with sources, the DC history with a source document per point, the counterfactual against the Toronto CMA median household income ($121,200, 2021 Census), the CMHC June 2026 city comparison, Toronto's DC service breakdown, the 2026 experiment and its predictions, and the data gaps with their fixes. public/data/BUILD_NOTE.md documents the sources, the worked-stack method, and what could not be built. The source extractions (dc-comparison-cmhc2026.csv, cmhc-toronto-dc-2026.csv) and the original CMHC workbook and research brief live in data/.

Author

Richardson Dackam (Open Nshipyard)

• Site: https://canada.nshipyard.com
• X: https://x.com/opennshipyard

Author

Richardson Dackam

• X: https://x.com/richardsondx
• GitHub: https://github.com/richardsondx

Part of Open Nshipyard: https://open.nshipyard.com