Vacancy Taxes as a Response to the Housing Crisis

Tonya Mosley reports on a push to implement new taxes on vacant properties as communities wrestle with high housing costs and homelessness.

"According to the U.S. census report, a little over 12% of units in the U.S. were vacant in the third quarter of 2019. "And an estimated 4,000 parcels are empty in Oakland [California], a city that’s also grappling with rising homelessness," writes Mosley.

Vacancy taxes are increasingly under consideration as tool for making sure all available housing units are being used. Despite the efforts of some researchers, there's still very little active data on vacancy, according to the article (see the example of anonymous shell companies buying properties with cash). Good and timely data will be necessary to calculate an effective vacancy tax.

For examples of what forms vacancy taxes can take, there are already real world examples to chose from in Vancouver, B.C. and Washington, D.C. "[T]he vacancy tax in Vancouver, Canada, is defined by an amount of time that the property is unused, while in Washington, D.C., blighted homes are assessed then taxed accordingly."

The article includes highlights from an interview with Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.