Taxes on vacant rental units means they'll be sold sooner, and increases the odds they'll be sold to an occupant instead of a speculator. I am a capitalist above basically anything else but that sounds great to me (and I already own a home and will likely never move again).
> Almost everyone I know who purchases houses/apartments to rent them would get out of the business if vacancies were taxed
Yes, you've successfully articulated the point. In an actual free market where supply can be added easily with minimal headache, buying an asset to rent it back is perfectly fine. In something like the housing marketing, buying a home specifically to rent it out is bad whether it's one unit or one thousand because supply is already artificially constrained. The end of that line is BlackRock buying up thousands of homes and materially hurting Americans. The fact that some random person with a few million in inheritance can make money in the interim is irrelevant.
> but a lot of houses would also go out of circulation, because these people often buy distressed homes that banks won't give a loan on - and they renovate them, bring them up to code, etc.
It's pretty easily to exclude vacant homes with open permits that are actively being renovated or with 203(k) loans, or to provide revenue-neutral tax breaks. This is a legitimate criticism but it means you address the criticism, it doesn't mean the original goal is bad or impossible.
> There are ways to do this that may not be popular. The main one would be to remove fixed interest mortgages.
We should definitely remove fixed-interest mortgages for non-owner occupied purchases.
