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Comment by strongpigeon | Hacker News Reader

A problem is that the externalities of leaving a space vacant are not priced in. Having a bunch of storefront vacant in an area makes it much less appealing and devalues all the other properties surrounding it. It does seem like a vacant storefront tax, which is briefly mentioned at the end of the article, could address this, if partially.

This whole extend and pretend deal seems like it's simply accumulating risk hoping this will pass, while risking an even bigger, potentially systemic crash. Though I honestly don't know that much about the commercial finance world.

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That would just devalue the surrounding property even more. This is why "we should just do X" is almost always a bad idea.

By "devalue" you mean "lower the price of" which... seems fine? Useful assets being cheaper is a good thing.

As long as you're not the owner of said asset.

Does your house stop being a house if the price goes down?

Does your car drive worse if no one will buy it?

I'm not saying it doesn't suck to overpay for something, but you can't expect too much pity when you lose money speculating.

yes, this entire discussion is about a policy which might be good for communities but not necessarily for real estate speculators who keep storefronts in those communities empty

Still doesn't matter to you unless you're trying to sell it.

Or you think the best way to deal with people getting scammed, is to make sure everyone gets scammed, to avoid being unfair to the initial victims of the scam. For example if Billy put $200 in a Ponzi scheme we should tax everyone else $200 to make it fair.

> That would just devalue the surrounding property even more.

Why do you think that's the case? I'm sure it would make the entire city seem like a riskier investment at first, but it seems like in the medium term it would help address the situation described in the article.

A "vacant storefront tax" would easily be circumvented by a legal entity with a vending machine business or the "owner" themselves putting one of their "offices" there (a table).

Any realistic vacant land tax with teeth would obviously need to define vacancy such that silly tricks like this wouldn't work.

And in response, owners would do something slightly less silly - just enough to technically fall within the rules, and so not be subject to the tax.

Then fix those technicalities, too. People act as though laws are etched permanently into clay tablets. Lawmakers should keep iterating until the bugs are worked out and the letter of the law more closely approaches the spirit of the law.

We shouldn't just always default to doing nothing because someone, somewhere is going to try to rules-lawyer their way out of it.

That's called "intervention spiral" where you need to put even more regulations on top of existing regulations because market forces are always leaking through. They should fix the underlying reason which is too restrictive zoning.

No no no .. snails!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9v1rjlekpeo

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