Shifting the tax burden from homeowners and productive businesses onto idle land holders means that those that drive the community will penalize investment less and use limited resources in more effective ways.
Efficiency helps the wealthy, but it can help those with less even more, as it matters more.
How many of those houses are on the fringes, and how many are in the CBD? If there's a vacant plot next to the town hall then it doesn't really matter how many vacant houses are a 1-hour drive out, that town-hall adjacent plot is being wasted.
> How many of those houses are on the fringes, and how many are in the CBD?
Take a look for yourself[0]. This is just outside of the downtown area. Loads of vacant lots. This is theoretically prime real estate, and would be ripe for development. The problem is, it's the fucking hood and no one wants to live there. Detroit emptied out over the decades and those empty lots _used_ to be decaying crack houses. So several years ago Detroit had them leveled to reduce blight. Now they're whining that people are just "speculating" by sitting on the empty land. If there was even the slightest hint that developing this land made sense economically, someone would have done it by now. It's just too convenient to the downtown area. And yet, no one has. Perhaps there's more at play than just people trying to sit on empty land.
