It doesn't go into a ton of detail but it shows it's very common. One reason is that there's a cost to renting a place out with maintenance and dealing with tenants. If you just let the place sit, it's an investment like the many paintings rich people own that they never see, it's just a place to park money for later.
Other cities not in Washington should try this, too. Vacant or unused apartments should be taxed too.
I live in Miami. My building is 55-60% occupied at best during peak season (October/November through March). The building is over 5 years old yet 10-20% of units are literally unfinished, and another 10-20% are used so infrequently (less than 8-10 weeks a year)......yet we have a ton of homelessness and it seems developers are too poor to build anything but "ultra-luxury" (their words) developments.
The thing that doesn't add up is the onerous zoning restrictions. When you're limited in how many units you can build, and that total is lower than the demand for the highest-margin "luxury" housing, guess what gets built?
You can have exclusionary low-density zoning and homelessness, or you can have abundant affordable housing but residential areas are a mix of building types (SFH, MFH).
Maybe just crank up property taxes to put more pressure on productive use of the property? Then take the extra property tax to subsidize in-need housing, win win?
How about just reform land use and take away the NIMBY/city-level veto over denser forms of housing? This is a far larger and far lower-hanging fruit than trying to tax 2-3% of units onto the market. After the housing construction industry collapsed after 2007-2008, we underbuilt several million housing units and are now suffering the results of low vacancy rates. You can't redistribute your way out of a shortage, but you can build your way out of one.
> After the housing construction industry collapsed after 2007-2008, we underbuilt several million housing units and are now suffering the results of low vacancy rates.
What does that have to do with NIMBY/city-level veto over denser forms of housing? I don't see how your argument flows from the 1st sentence to the 2nd and then the third.
contractors can afford to build more apartments/units if NIMBYs and zoning power (to prevent dense housing) are reduced. They can sell more units per square meter of land.
Contractors can afford to build housing when their is demand and profit involved. They didn’t stop building after 2008 because of zoning, they stopped building because demand fell off a cliff. Once demand recovered, the industry was depleted of talent and capital to get started very quickly, zoning had very little to do with it.
Permits to build, permits to remodel, taxes for simply existing year-over-year, taxes for having too few people living in the house... is there a limit to how far government will go to control what people can and cannot do with their own property?
It won't be your property forever, and future tenants have a right to live in a place that was constructed safely. I'd rather not find out that the wiring of the house I bought was installed by an unlicensed amateur when it burns down the house. That house fire could also spread to your neighbors, so it's not just your property that's at stake.
I agree that some permitting requirements can get out of hand; for example, some jurisdictions require a permit for repairs as simple as replacing a kitchen tap. But I'd rather the law be too stringent in this regard than too lenient, and it’s easy enough to flout the law for simple things like a kitchen tap.
No, unless you think an empty lot in downtown Manhattan should continue to go unused forever. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that land is used effectively.
Citation needed. Unless the house is a total dump, why would said firms pass up on the revenue from renting the place out?
>in 2021, [Seattle] had 33,100 vacant homes
How many of these houses were vacant for legitimate reasons: in between owners/rental tenants, or under renovation?