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A Vancouver council candidate proposing a "mansion tax" wants to take $174 million from the rich each year and give it to the poor.

On Saturday, longtime anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson pitched two special property-tax brackets for high-value homes at a rally in Vancouver's Point Grey neighbourhood, where listings for detached homes range from $2 million and up.

"Chip in, Chip!" her supporters shouted as they marched down to the sprawling, $75.8-million waterfront compound of Lululemon Athletica founder Chip Wilson, now owner of Low Tide Properties.

Once there, Swanson presented a man wearing a mask of the yoga-leggings tycoon's face with a fake 2018 notice of assessment, warning him that he'd have to "chip in" an extra $1.37 million under her property-tax regime on top of the $195,000 he paid this year.

Swanson, who was awarded the Order of Canada last year, is running as an independent in the Oct. 14 byelection.

She said her two proposed tax brackets would draw an extra one per cent from homes assessed at $5 million or higher and two per cent from homes assessed at $10 million or higher. She estimates owners of 4,942 affected homes would pay an additional $174 million annually.

"We've been working on this policy a lot lately and the more I think about it, the more I like it and think that it's absolutely necessary and, if anything, it's too low," Swanson said.

"We're all in the middle of a housing crisis, we have 2,000 people homeless on the streets dying at half the age of other people. The average one-bedroom apartment is $2,000 a month, more than the total minimum wage for a full-time worker."

The $174 million a year would immediately go to modular housing for the homeless, then social and co-op housing, Swanson said. Eventually, she would look at lowering property taxes for other homeowners.

Swanson's tax could bring in even more money if applied to all $5-million-plus residential properties, according to Andy Yan, at Simon Fraser University's City Program.

Yan said a deeper analysis of B.C. assessment data identified a total of 5,356 residential properties with an assessed value over $5 million, including 506 strata-lot condos.

Yan was intrigued by how this top three per cent of the city's properties alone held 14.2 per cent ($39.5 billion) of the market's total $278 billion assessed value.

"I think that gives you a sense of what the Swanson mansion tax is trying to talk about," he said.

"Maybe we should consider a progressive land tax, because we actually have other taxation schemes (like the ICBC) vehicle tax (for) luxury cars as an example of that belief in a progressive taxation system. It's not a foreign system, it's not something that's coming totally out of the blue."

The idea of a "mansion tax" is not new, either. New York State implemented one in 1989, though it functions as a transfer tax on real estate worth more than $1 million. Swanson said her tax more closely resembles an income tax recently approved by Seattle city council, which when implemented will draw 2.25 per cent annually from residents earning more than US$250,000.

University of B.C. economist Thomas Davidoff said Swanson's tax would primarily affect homeowners who bring money from outside of Vancouver into the city, and is particularly beneficial to residents.

"It's very hard to find anything undesirable about raising taxes on high-value Vancouver property," he said. "Obviously, it's bad for the rich guys."

Davidoff drew a comparison between a homeowner living in a $5-million mansion, declaring a poverty income and paying $20,000 a year in property tax but no income tax, and a tech worker making $200,000 a year and renting but paying $60,000 in income tax.

"The idea that somebody sitting in a $5 million property, not working, ought to pay way less tax than somebody renting and working, making $200,000, doesn't make sense," he said.

Davidoff said the revenues generated by a mansion tax could mean tax breaks for lower-income earners and a better-functioning economy in the city. But there's a simple reason it hasn't been implemented, he added: "Politicians don't like to irritate the kind of people who live in $5 million to $10 million homes. But there's no good reason not to do it."

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