And then the owners can do what they did in Vancouver and rent the properties out to students for a couple months before tax time, claim the lots aren't vacant and avoid the tax, then jack up the rent so high they're forced to move.
A better variant was proposed by an economist at UBC (Tom Davidoff). There would be a high property tax on ALL properties, which you could reduce by the amount of income tax you actually pay in the province.
Whether the property is vacant or not, the tax must be paid. But if you actually pay taxes for working here, it’s cool.
A large investment property would probably cost several tens of thousands of dollars in property tax per year? Not many residents probably pay that much income tax, what do you do with those?
I didn’t capture Davidoff’s proposal accurately. There is a basic property tax that everyone pays. An additional tax is the one that you can write down to zero by earning income.
Even better, just aggressively tax owners based on the land value. This requires them to either eat high costs for their speculation, or use it for income-producing purposes (someplace to live or someplace to work).
What about the old people who didn't buy a house a long time back and now face high rents? Why is it always a selective group of old people we are supposed to carefully design policy to perfectly accommodate?
High enough land value tax, consistently applied, will make the land cheaper and affordable to said old couple, because it neutralizes the phenomenon that land continuously increases in value as long as the population keeps growing.
Applying a tax commensurate with income-earning potential is the usual explanation.
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.
why should property tax only be a function of property? Shouldn't property tax be a little like income tax and also be a function of the 'ability to pay'= Function(wealth, income,dependents)
There are ... some ways of achieving this somewhat equitably.
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.
I would be okay with, for example, demonstrating that a property was my primary address, perhaps via affidavit, or in the case where I was renting, providing a signed lease.
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.
Only the high value suspicious ones. If a residence in a high value area is claimed as occupied, but no one put it on their drivers licenses/ID or any other existing government interaction then request additional documentation. Let neighbors report vacant property and require multi-family building administrators to report suspiciously under utilized units.
in the age of deep learning, streetview and daily satellite images it should be possible to determine automatically. Of course such an operation opens the door to all sorts of surveillance.
I quickly read the second link you provided and didn't see anything backing up your claim about landlords jacking up rents but I could have missed it. It's also worth noting that there are laws that prevent large rent increases in Vancouver.
I live in Vancouver, and the vacancy and foreign ownership taxes have moderately improved the rental situation. It has also just encouraged the worst types of buyers to move onto other jurisdictions.
To be effective, they probably need to have the tax rates on an elevator until the market corrects though.
And if we started treating behavior like this as equivalent to the search for bug bounties, we could iteratively patch the law until it is no longer cost-effective to search for them.
This. I was working with a startup and on my first day onsite, I was sat next to the company lawyer. He told me he had just finished up a contract that was riddled with landmines. He seemed so proud of himself.
At a later point when renegotiating, I was given one of these dangerous contracts to sign. When I brought to light my concerns, said lawyer set up a face to face with me. His first words were, "If you weren't an engineer, you would have made a good lawyer."
Somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously: I wish that laws and changes to them were organized and published like repos and pull requests on github.
It'd be such a lead forward in transparency if 'bugs' (loopholes), authors, and proposed changes were out in the open -- and the history and reasoning behind them equally public.
In theory I think this is the way many countries legal systems already work: the case law and regulations are technically public. But it's generally only accessible (in both the sense of retrieval, and also in the sense of understanding the language) to subject experts.
Software bugs and proposed changes _are_ accessible only to subject experts, or people keen enough wrt. software to be of above average technological competence.
The only difference is, were the subject matter experts in the domain where GitHub and the likes rule.
At least where I live, court records are accessible to the lay person (after clearing some hurdles). Will anyone look at them aside from lawyers and law students? Probably not...
Greater transparency in lawmaking and governance is always a good thing, though, and most government's don't achieve it to any great extent.
In the UK we have council tax which is a fee to local government paid monthly for services like road maintenance and waste disposal. In recent years the majority of councils have started charging double the rate on properties that are empty, even for just one month. I hope this will start to balance the disparity between empty houses and the number of homeless people.
That would have a very regressive effect on those who don't have the capital or credit to outright own their home barring largly outmoded
boarding house style rentals. That property tax would be passed on to the renters.
Whether the property is vacant or not, the tax must be paid. But if you actually pay taxes for working here, it’s cool.