[posguy]

Two of the homes on my block here in an inner Seattle suburb are owned by Chinese investors and have never been lived in or rented.

The owner of one property owns 8 other newly built homes within the city. The 2nd property is owned by a person that has 14 other properties listing them as the registered owner.

I miss the people that lived in the homes that were razed to make way for these million dollar blights on the neighborhood.

These vampire homes just accrue damage (whether the glass garage door panes start shattering, or the siding starts going, or the owner decides the landscaping should be ripped out and redone again for god knows what reason?) followed by the sons or cousins of the property owners dealing with it a few weeks later.

No value is gained by these vagrant properties existing. Less people live in my neighborhood due to it, housing is harder to find, the city and county have less reason to invest in making local transit infrastructure better.

We need to tax vagrant properties. USPS has the data on which units are not collecting their mail on a daily basis, SPU/City Light knows who is not putting their trash out or using any power or water, and voter registration records are public. We could easily start assessing a 3 cent per square foot daily vagrancy tax until residency is established at the formerly vagrant address.