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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

What if you drop the price to zero and still nobody has any use for it at the moment?

How about making the tax increase each month the unit is unoccupied, but also making it proportional to the asking rent? No one has any use for it, high asking rent => high tax. No one has any use for it, very low asking rent => low tax.

That would require that nobody has any extra use for free/cheap space. It would mean that nobody needs additional storage space, nobody needs space for a studio or an office.

This would essentially only happen if you rented in a mega high crime area, which means landlords would be incentivized to do something about crime.

If nobody will buy the property for $1 then it's worthless. Gift it the local authority and then you won't have to pay the tax.

People won't buy it because it comes with a tax burden. They might buy it to redevelop it if it didn't.

So over time the vacancy tax is increasing and the sale price is going down. Obviously the vendor needs to sell or redevelop before the price hits zero. If they fail to do so then they lose the property. Speculation sometimes fails. What's the problem?

Good, then it will go to someone who needs a house, not another rent-seeking parasite.

That does not seem like a realistic problem for very many places. If a jurisdiction contains land with so little value that it won't support the taxes required for upkeep of the jurisdiction, then the jurisdiction could dissolve. Which is what happens to a ghost town I would imagine. That is not likely to happen to New York City.

Presumably the vacancy tax would be tied to the value of the property. If the property really is worthless you won’t be paying taxes on it.

> Presumably the vacancy tax would be tied to the value of the property.

> increases every month

It can't be both things at the same time.

And who's setting this land value? If it's on the market and nobody's buying then we don't know the value.

Why can’t it be both? Could have a logarithmic scale, could have it increase by a fraction of a % of $(value - currentTax) so that it increases more slowly over time.

Not saying I agree with the underlying idea, just confused about why “increases ever month” necessarily means it cannot be “tied to the value of the property” in a `calculateTax(propValue, timeEmpty)` sort of way.

Then you use a percent of asking rent

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