Have you considered that these people payed for their house fair and square and that it's profoundly unfair to charge them just because you and others don't like what they chose to do with it?
Empty homes attract crime, necessitating more policing resources, empty homes do not support local businesses but drive up prices, making the area less affordable for residents and less lucrative for businesses.
The 'payment' for living in an urban environment goes beyond just the normal local taxes, it involves a participation because the resident who lives in a home in that environment contributes to the environment.
No house is an island in an urban environment (except maybe in Venice).
Talk to someone living in San Jose or San Francisco about their daily commute on 85 or 101. They somehow don't profess as much love for densely populated urban environments.
I still get annoyed by traffic, as I can remember when there was barely any back in the 90's. But then every time I drive down to Seattle, I realize how good we have it in comparison.
The city is for living in, else it's a dying city. This step taken by the city of Vancouver isn't reactive, the problem has been propagating for 15+ years and has started to have a very large negative impact on the people who want to live there.
I myself, and many others that I know, have moved away from Vancouver or are planning to exit because they can't find or can't afford accommodation. It's not like SF where huge salary and booming business jacks up the prices. Vancouver is just a regular city.
Why would you sit on prime investment property and not rent it? Because when it comes time to sell, you may end up with a tenant who's not paying rent and whom you cannot evict. The cost may just be large enough to forego the income of having a renter. Laws meant to protect bad renters end up hurting everyone.
Or we could slap more bad laws on top of more bad laws.
More liberal building permits? Have you seen downtown Vancouver? There are towers everywhere. Infrastructure already cannot keep up with the pace of development in the city and surrounding it.
The city should have had a much better long term plan and not grabbed easy cash when it was available. Chinese investment was good for cleaning up Yaletown but it's gutted the city as far as I am concerned. Vancouver is a beautiful place but it's like a vapid supermodel. Nice to look at, but not something I could live with.
I remain very unconvinced on how this is a good thing, but i can see how easy it is to sell to capture more tax.
Long answer: New York City has historically had a policy that NYC is for New Yorkers. There are several aspects to this. One is the cooperative ("coop") structure that came about as rent control was (largely) unwound. Coops are typically owner-occupied and coops tend to have limits on renting out your property or even just not living in it that may require you to sell it. This is (IMHO) a good thing as condos, which don't tend to have the same restrictions, are often ghost buildings (the NYT has done pieces on this where occupancy rates can be 30% or lower).
This has meant that condos in the same area have tended to attract a premium of ~20% versus an equivalent coop. Condo buyers are dominated by foreign buyers paying all cash who are parking money in the US and/or buying an apartment they might occupy a few days a year.
This sort of thing is not good for the city as a whole. These residents aren't funding city services. Foreign buyers have I believe decimated neighbourhoods in other cities (eg I heard of this happening in Tel Aviv).
Now Bloomberg kinda went too far on this as he believe that you should attract the billionaires to the point that someone who owns a $100m condo (of which there are now several) pays only about 10-15x the property tax of a $1m condo. This is something that needs to be reformed.
I'm very much in favour of public policy that benefits residents be they owners or renters.
Now other commenters have pointed out one issue and that is you have to be careful you don't catch landlords in your net. Landlords provide a useful service in providing a rental stock for people to rent. There are various reasonable ways to handle this. Some options:
- Don't tax a property (extra) if it's occupied by somebody;
- Exempt landlords from the higher prices if they're a resident of the state (and paying state income taxes).
This can be a way of handling illegal hotels too. Have much higher taxes for non-active properties and reporting AirBnB type income can trigger whatever housing regulations apply so illegal hoteliers are faced with a choice of paying higher property tax if nothing else.
The people who sold that house for $1.25M also enjoy free healthcare in Canada. I have to pay 40% of my income to foot that. The average cost of our healthcare system is about $3500/citizen, but the high end of the average is typically found with older people in their 70's. Why should I have to pay 40% of my income to pay for the medical costs incurred by that old guy who sold his house for $1.25M to a Chinese investor who will pay almost nothing in Canadian income taxes?
Then, we can talk about the fact that Vancouver is mostly zoned for detached homes. We can say that if a property developer buys a bunch of detached homes and then wants to consolidate the properties to build townhouses, that it's "profoundly unfair" to try to prevent that, but that's exactly what detached home owners have done over and over again, both by lobbying and supporting those restrictive zoning laws and by speaking out against developers at city council meetings. That's why almost all new townhouse and apartment developments in Vancouver are in reclaimed commercial zones.
Let's address the whole problem all at once. Right now people who own houses are having it both ways.
Which he won't pay taxes on because it is his primary residence.
Those who happened to get shut out of the property market simply for being born on the wrong place at the wrong time are paying a much larger portion of the tax bill than those who were "lucky" enough before everything went parabolic. It's actually the opposite of a progressive tax, which Canadians claim to love so much (but the real reason they love it is because they think they're sticking it to someone else.....try and take their capital gains tax exemption away and watch their principles on taxation do a 180).
About the only thing the government can't force you to do (in the United States) is quarter soldiers during peacetime.
Like the sibling comment said, you live in a society so we all have to play nice with each other.
[1] most cities forbid a large number of unrelated people from living together.
I would not oppose having a quantitative measure of how empty homes ultimately harm Vancouver's economy in the long term. I think that would be a much more constructive argument to implement measures to curb this trend.
We've kind of decided on using a democratic process, which indeed is a form of mob rule.
As for the danger of this approach....so multi-millionaires have one less global city they can buy property in completely hassle free....I think they'll find a way to survive.
"Ochlocracy ("rule of the general populace") is democracy ("rule of the people") spoiled by demagoguery, "tyranny of the majority", and the rule of passion over reason, just as oligarchy ("rule of a few") is aristocracy ("rule of the best") spoiled by corruption, and tyranny is monarchy spoiled by lack of virtue. Ochlocracy is synonymous in meaning and usage to the modern, informal term "mobocracy", which arose in the 18th century as a colloquial neologism."
For instance, I don't have the right to set up a nightclub without permission from the city, and (if I'm not being an asshole) neighbours and other nearby residents/businesses that would be affected.
These limits come into existence because there was a problem that residents of the city felt needed action on. Leaving large numbers of properties empty is the extreme opposite end of everyone running nightclubs.
Private property is not some sovereign nation. It's still subject to law.
Maybe there's a justification for an empty home tax, but I don't see it in your argument.
> You don't own the market and the extent to which you have a right to influence it is limited to whatever influence your own offers, bids, purchases and sales have.
...and to the extent that the government can influence it with taxes and tariffs, which is a perfectly acceptable form of market intervention.
All resources are limited. That doesn't justify robbing people of their property rights, by dictating how they shall use their own resources.
The only justification I can see for such a tax is that it involves the usage of land, and the moral arguments for absolute ownership of land being much weaker than for other types of property.
>...and to the extent that the government can influence it with taxes and tariffs, which is a perfectly acceptable form of market intervention.
Politically acceptable, morally totally unacceptable. A tax on private transactions is just extortion that has the support of the majority. Something doesn't stop being authoritarian just because it gets the stamp of political approval or majority support.
Yes, it does, if the voters decide it does. Republic beats market.
> morally totally unacceptable
Ah, yes, beating the "taxes are rape" drum. Since when is the market "moral?!" Also, this isn't a private transaction, it's a property tax. You are paying the government a fee for the protection of your property from bandits, raiders, fire, invading armies, and other malicious actors as well as gaining access to electricity, roads, water, waste management, etc.
If you don't like it, sell your luxury $3M house that you don't live in and buy a house in some other rich coastal town that values property rights. Let the market decide.
EDIT:
A thought experiment: is it within your property rights to dump toxic industrial waste chemicals on your own property? Let's say it is. What about when your chemicals that you have every right to dump on your own property start leaking onto your neighbor's property? Is it still within your property rights when it starts adversely affecting the people around you? Is it still your own personal decision to do what you want on your property even though it is now affecting the people around you?
Having an empty $3M house sitting around invites theft. It invites disrepair. It affects the market value of the homes around it. If your neighbor's house is affecting the market value of your house, is that neighbor within their property rights?
Where do you draw the line?
No it doesn't. People's rights are inalienable. Rights would be meaningless if they're merely created at the whim of the majority.
>Ah, yes, beating the "taxes are rape" drum.
The prisons you send tax evaders to have a problem with rape. You're endorsing doing this to people who don't pay a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
>Also, this isn't a private transaction, it's a property tax.
I was referring to your comment that tariffs and the like are justifiable.
> Is it still within your property rights when it starts adversely affecting the people around you?
No of course it isn't within your rights. At this point you're engaging in an action that is causing toxic chemicals to violate the property of your neighbours.
The governing bodies that enforce these so-called inalienable rights are the ones that grant them as well, and it is up to them, and in many cases the people who comprise them, which rights are granted. Rights are not some absolute concept defined by Ayn Rand. They are an artifact of civilized society.
The property rights you describe are not as binary as you wish them to be.
Such a definition of rights would render the term meaningless.
And it's not even an onerous requirement on the owners. They will just have to rent them out, now. And they can hire companies that will fully manage it all for them, and still make a profit, marginal as it may be. So it's actually better for them as well.