As part of Susan Funk’s campaign for an Atascadero City Council seat, she’s proposed a potential vacancy tax to rid the city of empty lots—but the city said that it’s using a different tack and it’s working.
Funk said the vacancy tax is just one of many options to address an issue the city is having with vacant properties that are kept in poor, undeveloped conditions by out-of-town landlords.
“Our city is very limited in its revenues, and we don’t have a lot of empty land in which additional new businesses and income can come in and develop,” Funk said. “So we really need to have our spaces working productively for the city.”
She said the tax could wedge landlords into selling the land or updating a building. The tax idea is a way to get people to talk about alternatives, which Funk said is more important to her than the tax itself.
“When people start talking about what are different ways we could attack this problem, we understand the problem better and develop better solutions,” she said.
Funk said she started talking about a vacancy tax when she heard the idea from the city’s community development director, Phil Dunsmore, during a strategic planning meeting in February.
Dunsmore told New Times that he and other city staff members were asked to bring a toolbox of options to the meeting that could address blight in the downtown area. One of the potential tools was the vacancy tax.
“A lot of bigger cities use it because they have a lot of big blocks of blight they have big issues with,” he said. “The property owner may put something in there temporarily or out of desperation that might not be what the city wants. It’s not necessarily the spirit of Atascadero, which is a business friendly environment.”
The city is taking a different approach to try to get those lots filled. Dunsmore said city staff speaks with property owners to try and understand their obstacles—whether it might be a zoning issue, parking, or conditions of the building.
“There have been a couple of spaces in the heart of downtown that were vacant and blighted for many years but now most of those have been solved, because we’re getting a beautiful La Plaza project,” he said. “Those vacancies are going away except for one or two others.”
This article appears in Oct 25 – Nov 4, 2018.
What a misleading headline! As the article states, it wasn’t Susan’s idea. But it’s an example of how she is willing to consider and investigate the best ideas of our planning department, business owners, and community members. She’s willing to be bold and creative to solve our city’s problems. Susan Funk will be great on Atascadero City Council, and we are so lucky that she wants to lend her experience and energy to our city government.
To make accommodation more affordable, you need land owners to increase the supply of accommodation to a point where it reduces their rents. They won’t do that if you simply remove obstacles to the supply of accommodation. You also need to penalize failure to supply.
At some point they might just learn that you can’t keep taxing and feeing people and expect them to think positively of doing business in your town. For a business or propert owner that’s an anvil around there neck looking at a swamp. The better thing to do is offer a financial benefit to perform instaed of threatening them
Keeping land unoccupied and unavailable is not “doing business in your town”. It is preventing others from doing business in your town. Why threaten the offenders with a stick instead of offering them a carrot? Because the stick is cheaper.