Comment by Animats

> The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move.

That too is a "it depends". For a failing mall, getting anyone into the empty spaces starts to become important to the other tenants because anything that draws people into the mall is a potential customer. Customers will even no shop you just because they know there is nothing else in the mall. Thus some malls near me have museums and the like inside - anything to get traffic.

This just says that they have too much power and society would be better off having a vacancy tax that aimed to reduce abuse by landlords while at the same time ensuring the city doesn't look like post crisis Detroit, which makes it worse for everyone.

> A building half rented at rent X is more profitable than a building fully rented at rent 0.5 X.

That's assuming rents would decrease by half, and also that it's still half occupied. A building half rented at X isn't more profitable than a building fully rented at 0.7 X. A building 25% rented at X isn't more profitable than a building fully rented at 0.5 X.

> That can crash the rental market.

At this point I think that's exactly what we need in a lot of places.

> The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move.

Since when have tenants known each other's rents?