DC's vacant property inventory is about to decrease
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Read More: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2016-jul-dcs-vacant-property-inventory-is-about-to-decrease
This may be a good idea for Jacksonville but only if having an empty lot is made more expensive than having a vacant building. Otherwise this would risk losing even more old building stock.
But, if done properly this may motivate speculators to sell their unused buildings and lots to those who will do something with them and hopefully also drive some of the imho ridiculous asking prices down.
Also, would it be possible to charge owner of empty lots and vacant buildings an infrastructure fee ? After all, there are water mains, sewer pipes, electric wiring etc to maintain but if they are not used they degrade, plus is anyone paying any fees / contributions if the property is vacant ?
They said the same about La Villa, and look at what this has also done to Springfield.
You have to be careful about crafting a law that rules out speculators or people taking unfair advantage of a certain system, for whatever motive, and investors who have a lot in transition that is meant to be improved at some point as system/economics allows. Also, whether we agree or disagree with the way things are now, the system does allow for certain privacies from public knowledge regarding property ownership. Most of the real estate community is used to having that privacy as an option (for instance, for various reasons investors or general owners, local or otherwise, may not want transaction information to be readily available to the media/public without a bunch of hassle/work, so eliminating that or at least much of that, is going to prove difficult).
These types of laws don't work in SF because there are too many other competing laws on the books and odd economic circumstances. We have various tax and rent controls to work with, as well as systems in place for condo/TIC/co-op conversion and eviction. This would add another layer of complexity and depending on the tax rate could be seen as an effective "taking of property" by government. In fact, they tried to increase fees for "Ellis Acting" tenants here (form of eviction where the property must also essentially be nearly vacant for a certain period of time before actual conversion from rental to condo, so this tax couldn't be forced on that legal framework) and CA Supreme Court struck down the Ellis Act fees as an effective taking of property by SF (they were so burdensome as to attempt to stop people from being able to use effectively the only legal route left to convert rentals to condos).
Anyway, I digress, this probably only scratches the surface, but let's say you have an investor sitting on land in DC where it wants to put up a building once it receives all its legal hurdles, and let's say financing is not quite there. Let's also say there is some blight on the property that will be cleared once all demo permits are obtained, and let's say that's an additional cost the investor only wants to lump in with shoring/excavation permits.
Then let's say DC is like SF and has the world's longest permitting process, and all these hoops to jump through and the thing sits vacant for 2 years. Then the economy crashes, and this developer's investor wasn't as formidable as some others in DC with respect to their equity stack (the equity was parked with a more opportunistic developer as opposed to build-to-core, and financing and the equity as it stands has dried up). So the development team puts the land up for sale, and people wait around another year or two for "the bottom" to pick it up.
How do you treat this investment group with these kinds of laws/heightened taxes?