The city of Vancouver has decided to impose an empty house tax of 1% of the value of investment properties that are left vacant or rented less than half the year.

http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-tax.aspx

The money raised is to be directed at affordable housing.

I think this has merit. My sister who is lives in a relatively well to do city suburb has 5 of the properties out of 20 in her small street sitting vacant because the owners are relying on capital gains to drive returns rather than rental income. The ability to sell a house unencumbered by a rental contract plus the issue of wear and tear make this attractive. However it drives up prices.

We certainly should be considering something similar here.

How typically lefty.

So the ratbag socialists have found yet another way of getting their hands on someone else's money, & increasing the size of government all at once.

Steely if you want to waste your own money supplying housing to the Ne'er-do-Well, go for it, but you have no right to demand others do such a stupid thing.

If someone wants to take a chance on capital gains giving them a profit, that is their business, & none of yours or socialists governments.

I agree Steele, the proposal has merit, and Vancouver will make an ideal pilot study, on the effectiveness or otherwise of such a tax.

Affordable housing is a critical issue in Sydney, where house prices and rents are now beyond the capacity to pay of many ordinary people.
The building boom here is doing nothing to address the issue, other than line the already bulging pockets of developers and speculators.
In the inner city the Baird Governments policy towards public housing tenants is very much a "move them on" and replace with
un-affordable for most, 'Meriton' style dog boxes! The government is applying only lip service to the provision of affordable public housing in these inner city mega developments. For example the 'Green Square' development which is only 3.5km from the city and covering 278 hectares is expected to accommodate over 60,000 new people by 2030. There is little provision for public housing in this development. On today's values prices start at around $600,000 with many developers choosing to retain over 50% of new apartments for renting and overall control of the 'body corporate'. Most of the other apartments will be sold off to speculative landlords.
I haven't even touched on the issue of "rich mans welfare" where the state government spends vast amounts of public money on infrastructure which makes these developments more attractive and thus more valuable for the developer. Example Harry Triguboff is suggesting the new inner city light rail, not yet built, be extended from Kingsford to Eastgardens. This is where Harry has his huge 'Pagewood Green' (Harry stop using the word Green, as nothing you do is green.) development. If this went ahead it would add considerable value to Harry's project, not that Harry was thinking of that when he suggested it! I must admit Harry has offered to chuck in a couple of million towards this, which would cost the state a couple of billion, very big of Harry. As I said the state government likes to look after the "rich mans welfare".

So where to do it? Anywhere would be a good start but Sydney would be best. How to do it? Remind the State Government what a nice little earner that could be and it will reduce house prices too. I would love to see this but the developers and current owners will fight it as hard as they fought Keating's foray against negative gearing.
I hope the Canadian experiment gets plenty of publicity as something needs to be done.

I live in a beach side area where almost one third of the houses are vacant most of the year and half of the rest are retiree.
However there is very little employment in the area, and young people move out of the area for employment. The vacant houses are not suitable for the unemployed or working families.

A tax could only be placed on areas of demand for working persons or job seekers who could afford the rent. Unless the tax raised was used to subsidize rent.

Hasbeen says it all. An idiotic idea from one of the Comrades. Nobody is obliged to provide housing for other people, particularly when the housing has a fair chance of being trashed by feral tenants. If there are not enough landlords willing to let, that's just too bad. If it is OK for the commo SA government to keep Housing Trust houses vacant so that they can make a poultice on the land when they sell it to private developers, it's OK for private individuals to do what they bloody well like with their own properties. The idea sounds like one from the dead prick, Castro.