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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps property taxes in this area are not high enough? There needs to be more than just 'opportunity cost' for squatting on valuable space.

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No. No. No.

The power of government should never be used to force people from their property. Eminent domain is already horribly abused with seizure laws no person's property is safe. Why do others become so draconian when its other people's stuff? It is easy being generous when its not your pocket that is being emptied.

This isn't about forcing people from their property.

This is about a building with a certain code (retail) which has a particular purpose, and that purpose isn't being fulfilled. Taxing to change this mis-behavior is good.

I'd compare this more with someone buying a large hydroelectricity project and just stopping production. Land is a finite resource. However, I struggle with this because following this logic, is it OK for Argentina to seize bank accounts in foreign currency and pay them one unit of local currency for every US dollar seized because us dollars are a limited resource there?

The problem with trying to use taxes to punish what's seen as bad behavior is that it can punish people who aren't behaving badly. If the owners of the derelict property can currently afford their property taxes, they can probably still afford it after it's raised. But others who actively use their property and perhaps aren't as rich could face losing what's theirs.

If you want to talk about using the law to prevent situations like this, then it needs to be a law unto itself rather than something incorporated into the tax code.

People who are actively using their property would not pay the vacant retail property tax.

vacant vacant retail property tax everyone!

I'm not especially well-informed on these matters, but from the outside looking in, raising property taxes looks to me less like punishment or force, both of which are kind of indulgent as terms, than like a community of people using democratically-created and democratically-approved non-violent means to align resources and incentives. Being a property owner doesn't exempt someone from democracy.

>The problem with trying to use taxes to punish what's seen as bad behavior is that it can punish people who aren't behaving badly.

Agreed. I know that the businesses still surviving in my Downtown are doing just that. Surviving.

If property taxes increased on all retail buildings in the downtown, rents would surely increase as a result, and the businesses that can make a buck currently would probably have to close up shop and move farther out into the city.

Perhaps raising retail property taxes on buildings that sat empty might be a better solution? But then I suspect that all of those empty buildings would become filled with "fake" retail businesses... like a shoe shop that only opens up for 1 day a month or something.

I'm not so sure. It might take another 50 years before the buildings in my Downtown change ownership to more concerned owners, but it will happen on it's own eventually I would think.

Where my town in concerned, there is indeed a LOT of old money and I suspect that the current owners are too busy spending their family fortune... which will run out eventually if they neglect the family's historic rental properties.

This isn't about confiscation, it's about tuning one parameter of our society to achieve a more optimal result. The tax code is already heavily used to encourage some behavior and discourage others. While I would agree that it is being overused for this purpose (thus producing the crazy complex code we have now), at least property taxes are fairly simple.

It's like tuning the inflation rate or monster respawn rate of an MMORPG to get the most enjoyable game. Property taxes should be high enough to discourage ineffective use of space, but low enough so as not to discourage effective use of space. Too far in either direction and you end up with empty buildings.

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