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There are high costs to an empty apartment. The bank doesn't stop demanding payment if the apartment is empty. Same with property taxes, heating, insurance, gro
by jpollock 4y ago
There are high costs to an empty apartment. The bank doesn't stop demanding payment if the apartment is empty. Same with property taxes, heating, insurance, groundskeeping, etc. You can even find that the maintenance costs increase as problems that would have been seen and fixed (particularly leaks) are missed.
- halfjoking 4y agoI don’t think that’s incentive enough. There could be an Elysium scenario where the super-rich will pay anything to live in a high-demand area, so the prices go so high almost all properties end up empty. That doesn’t seem beneficial to society, the environment or anyone. If there were strong vacancy taxes the situation would change. Vancouver has a 3% empty homes tax. Let’s keep raising a tax like that until managing empty properties becomes untenable. If we want people to have more affordable homes to buy we should incentivize people living in them over managing them for optimal profit.