Comment by dietr1ch
8 hours ago
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.
Yup. Unfortunately landlords have plenty of time to lobby against things like this while the rest of us are busy contributing to society.
Most of the US does, its called property tax. Or in some cases, land value taxes.
That doesn’t work very well in practice because a half vacant commercial property has lower property value than a full one.
There are buildings that seem to purposefully keep commercial space vacant to devalue the building:
https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2021/09/10/trump-gets-anothe...
Not the same because it does not depend on utilisation. Pretty much everywhere you see property taxes, but vacancy taxes are a lot more recent and I guess rare so far.
Arguably vacancy taxes are just Georgism with extra steps
1 reply →
The city doesn't want commercial real estate values to collapse either, since buildings are taxed based on their value. If extend and pretend is ending, tax revenues are about to take a nosedive.
The city is better off having its citizens participate more in the economy and paying taxes through it than staying home or not starting business because rent is too high.