“The extraordinary gap between residents` housing needs and housing availability can only be bridged through the use of many policy interventions, including a vacant housing tax designed to incentivize landlords to put housing back on the market and prevent speculation,” city staff wrote. The speculation and vacancy tax is different from the Vancouver empty housing tax. The rules for each tax and how they are applied are not the same. In Los Angeles, officials struggled for years to ask voters the question after a 2020 report showed that about 85,000 to 100,000 units across the city could be empty. A new report from the ACCE Institute shows that the city has suspended more than 46,000 units on off-market vacations or “more than one for each unhoused person.” When reviewing the water registers, the SDHC study found that 2,183 of the 252,324 units may have been vacant for six months or more, a vacancy rate of 0.85%. I disagree, but I would just be honest about it. Landlords hate living next to vacant apartments or apartments used for seasonal purposes and would like to vote to tax them. Preston has already opted for this policy strategy by exempting its real estate transaction tax increase on transactions under $10 million, freeing up homebuyers and small, multiple families. I think in a city where high-income people think they belong to the middle class, it makes political sense to accuse landlords of having more in common with tenants than with these exceptions with large developers and landlords.

But Oakland and Vancouver, B.C. did not make such exemptions and their taxes on vacant housing were passed with overwhelming approval, despite a much higher proportion of working-class single-family home and duplex owners in Oakland. Find answers to your questions about what to do when helping to buy or sell a home in areas where the speculation and vacancy tax is applied. San Francisco could soon become the newest city to tell homeowners to put vacant apartments on the market or pay. On Feb. 8, City Manager Dean Preston and his supporters submitted a proposal to voters to decide in November this year whether the city should introduce a new tax on vacant housing, a measure currently being adopted around the world to encourage potential homeowners to put more homes on the market. However, taxes on vacant housing add an additional stressor for landowners. That said, homeowners will likely have to pay incredible costs upfront or sell their land at a lower value for prompt settlement. Taxes on vacant housing would likely take many different forms. Lens says some laws may treat landowners differently based on characteristics such as income or residence. For example, in Vancouver, Canada, the tax on vacant housing is defined by a period of time during which the property is not used, while in Washington, D.C., spoiled homes are assessed and then taxed accordingly. Contact us if you have any questions about speculation and vacancy tax or if you need translation services.

A tax on vacant housing “would help deter speculative vacancy, mitigate the damage caused by speculative real estate investments, and provide the financial resources needed for community programs to combat evictions, housing instability and homelessness,” according to a 2020 report by a coalition of social justice groups in Los Angeles. However, there is little data on the effectiveness of taxes on vacant housing in increasing the supply of available housing in competitive markets. Where taxes on vacant housing have been introduced, housing policy analysts say new housing units are entering the market and new tax revenues are being generated for local governments. But even if they succeeded, taxes on vacant housing were not enough to bring prices down significantly in a city. To meet demand, cities need more new buildings. Also known as the “vacancy penalty,” a vacancy tax would punish landowners who sit on their unused space. According to the Council`s legislative report, there is a high probability that residential and commercial real estate will be affected by this proposal. To make matters worse, there is substantial evidence that this tax would not reduce vacancy rates. My honest opinion is that if you are influenced by rhetoric and who supports what as opposed to the actual results of a proposal, then you are just as reactionary as the side you reject. I don`t care about preston`s or the DSA`s anti-procurement rhetoric or who says what on Twitter or 48 Hills when it comes to the vacant housing tax.

My interest is simply to make housing affordable, abundant and accessible as I can. Even if it means voting for an idea that comes from someone I don`t agree with. It`s not difficult when you care about the results, not the debates. San Francisco, Napa, Santa Cruz and other cities all rank first in terms of attractiveness and median rents, pushing tax measures on vacant housing to face a growing housing availability crisis. In November, voters will assess claims that the strategy will free up revenue to create more affordable housing and bring more housing into the tight market amid widespread bidding wars. “We need to collect good data and timely data to know exactly what is free for how long, why and if there is any reason to believe that there is land speculation that is causing some of this vacancy,” he says. For example, Vancouver`s attempt to reduce the number of vacancies was not successful. Instead, there was a decline in residential real estate sales in the years following the vacant housing tax. In fact, the Vancouver Real Estate Board reported that residential property sales in the Greater Vancouver Area were the lowest since 2000. Of course, the Yimbys tormented all over Twitter because Dean Preston decided to add a stupid exemption for single-family homes and duplexes from the vacant housing tax.

For reference, this represents about 24% of all vacant housing units in the 2019 ACS 1-Year survey and the majority of long-term vacancy rates in the city according to 2020 experimental data. Preston`s defense is that private equity speculators did not target single-family homes in San Francisco as they did in other cities. This is neither true nor relevant (the Federal Reserve report notes that buyers of foreclosures companies have targeted single-family homes in the southeast of the SF).1 Clearly, the real reason is that proponents of the tax believe that the exemption for homeowners and very small homeowners will increase the likelihood that it will pass. We have already discussed how vacancies work. SF`s Office of Legislative Analysts (LAO) released a report on 40,000 vacant apartments in San Francisco, citing figures from the Census Bureau`s 1 Year 2019 report from the Census Bureau`s American Community Survey (ACS). Coinciding with this report, Supervisor Dean Preston presented a plan to tax these homes. To be clear, employment data is neither bomb nor news. It`s been publicly available since 2020, but most people aren`t aware of the data.

What is needed, he said, is a new building. And the tax on vacant housing is, at best, an instrument at the disposal of municipal leaders to increase the overall supply of housing. “It`s useful for margins and can generate more revenue,” says Phillips.