Couldn’t you just tax based on a percentage of the year a house sits vacant?
What about old people who bought the house long time back when it was cheap but dont have good source of income to pay the inflated tax?
I never understood why people consider equity to be essentially equivalent to liquid money.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/property-taxes/annu...
Half-exemptions for rent-seekers who can prove 90%+ occupancy.
Given the wide range of possible incomes to various professions, this can be problematic. Your $7.25/hr federal minimum wage worker ($14,500/year) competes against a $290k/yr SV tech worker, with 20x the income. Unless that's mitigated by other factors (residence size, amenities, etc.), a land tax might prove further discriminatory.
But in general, a tax that's sufficient to kill the prospects of real estate as simply a bankable nonproductive asset would be a net benefit.
One of the notions behind property tax is to make efficient use of land -- someone simply squatting on a property and not contributing to the local economy is a less efficient use than someone who's actively engaged. In particular, high-density uses are preferable to low, where land value is high.
That conflicts with the notion of neighbourhood and social stability. Kicking out pensioners (or young families) simply because they cannot afford to pay taxes ... is highly disruptive. For a sufficiently growing market, it need not be a necessary problem, tough much experience with gentrification (or its less genteel earlier forms of land appropriation and expropriation) show.
One possible compromise is to allow taxes to accumulate, but to factor against the value of the property itself. When the property is sold (or transfered in estate), those taxes come due, and are debited agains the value of the property. You don't evict those unable to pay, but the benefits of squatting do come with an (ultimate) cost. That cost is also a bankable asset to the government authority, who can consider this a future receivable.
Your comment makes it sound like the Gov't would start requiring some incredibly invasive monitoring. I think it more likely would merely require documentation and sworn statements similar to what we have long done with just about everything that is taxed.
I believe the BC law exempts empty yet available (for rent sign).
Your going to have to have an army of govt workers checking the validity of all claims they aren’t empty.
Jesus. Rat on your neighbors? Sounds like the Stasi.
A permanently absentee landlord is not a neighbor, and reporting a vacant lot next to my home is not ratting.