Empty Houses, Empty Assessments

We keep hearing that there are a lot of vacant houses and that this is a problem. Nobody wants to live in them. So it would be reasonable for the owners to tear them down and sell the land. But it costs money to tear a house down and the empty lot then incurs a higher tax bill than the empty house and lot did. So the house stays standing. Even though nobody lives there. And sometimes the owners (e.g., the people who inherited it) disappear rather than pay the property taxes.

Of course, one answer would be to sell the property. But nobody wants to buy it at what the owner wants to charge for it. This is true especially outside the big cities, where populations are declining and there is less demand for housing. So it stays there, running up tax bills. And the tax bills are assessed based upon some hypothetical value that we are told is less than some hypothetical market price. But what is the market price of a house nobody wants?

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Instead, I suspect the problem is that we have property-tax assessments based upon what the assessors think the property should be worth. Not what it is really worth but what they think it should be worth. So let me propose a change: Have all property tax assessments be actual statements of what the tax-collecting government is willing to buy the property for. If it is a vacant house in a ghost town, what is it worth? What will the government pay for it? Make that the assessed value for tax purposes. Governments can sustain tax revenues by changing the tax rate on the assessed value, but let’s at least ensure the assessed values are honest.

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