One Young (née Mayfair Hotel) | 5 fl | Complete

[zanate]

The other side of it is it is their land, it doesn't seem right to force them to build something if they don't want to.

I don’t find this too compelling because, in a lot of cases, vacant properties are owned on speculation. The owners are often hoping that activity on neighbouring properties, undertaken with other people’s (and the public’s) capital and other people’s risk, will increase the value of their own through no contribution of their own. It doesn’t seem like good policy to reward this with a lower tax rate, or to incentivize what we do not want (properties lying fallow) with the same.

While I agree that you shouldn't have tax policies forcing someone to build something to make economic use of the land they own, at the same time I think it's more important that you don't provide a perverse incentive to a landowner to demolish what's there (a currently vacant building, perhaps) to put in place a land use with a lower tax burden. This is how some depressed downtown areas have gone from old reusable building stock to parking lots.