Sometimes people want to sell their property, move somewhere else, etc. For example someone inherits a flat. They want to sell it. It's empty. Are they forced to lend it out or accept that it'll be squatted and then it'll take years to be able to sell it?
Vacancy tax as a concept seems interesting, but it seems hard to collect on it without a total centralized property and occupancy database. Plus it seems easy to have a few friends/relatives fake move into each of your vacant properties. (Though the tax might still make sense, because big real estate management companies will likely not engage in these workarounds, and thus it might help to put more units on the market with better rates.)
The market is not free. Otherwise people were building all over the place, making all kinds of contracts and so on. Mostly it's good that they don't, but a modern tragedy of cities is the drastically underprovision of new high density development and mass transit investments.
Vacancy tax as a concept seems interesting, but it seems hard to collect on it without a total centralized property and occupancy database. Plus it seems easy to have a few friends/relatives fake move into each of your vacant properties. (Though the tax might still make sense, because big real estate management companies will likely not engage in these workarounds, and thus it might help to put more units on the market with better rates.)
The market is not free. Otherwise people were building all over the place, making all kinds of contracts and so on. Mostly it's good that they don't, but a modern tragedy of cities is the drastically underprovision of new high density development and mass transit investments.