West Coast Cities Turn to Vacancy Taxes to Grapple with Housing Crisis

thundercleeze

As long as they don't let anyone build more housing: that'd ruin the character of the neighborhood.

gruez

This article is terrible. It starts off talking about high vacancy rates for commercial properties, then segues to talking about housing shortages. Vacancy rates for housing is definitely not in the 27% range implied by the article. They're in the single digits, with the hottest housing markets also having the lowest rates. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/current/index.html https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/rates.html Sorting by the census areas with the highest rates gets you areas like Jacksonville, FL, Baton Rouge, LA, and San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX. Superstar cities like SF and NY have rental vacancy rates of 5.5 and 5.4 respectively.

dangus

I can’t see it being a bad thing. The kind of landlord who is willing to keep a property vacant is not usually a struggling enterprise, unless we are talking about a completely hollowed out declining metropolitan area (which most west coast cities absolutely are not). In my city, one development in a highly desirable area basically demolished a historic building, built a new one with far more prime retail space including small storefronts and flagship retail (think grocery store or big box store), built it out completely in the interior, totally ready to lease. But in the years since they built the development, the bank branch is the only occupant. My guess is the bank is squatting on the property. It was probably easy to get a big “revitalizing” property approved, and now they can take a tax write off on multiple retail spaces that they apparently never intend to bother leasing out. Presumably they don’t want to bother leasing to anyone and actually have to deal with the management overhead of landlording unless someone comes in and pays inflated prices. So they’re happy to sit on it until someone bites. Meanwhile, it’s been an empty eyesore for years now.

swamp_donkey

Vancouver development is in bad shape now thanks to these taxes and a glut of new supply that was built with financing not available to the average developer Pre sales are dead. Some projects are in receivership. New Projects are not going ahead