Benefits of an Empty Homes Tax

 

An Empty Homes Tax offers many potential advantages to help address our Housing Crisis:

 

• Creates an incentive for property owners to immediately convert thousands of existing housing units into housing for long term residents.

• Converts empty homes into homes for local residents without long delays for development and permitting, costly construction, government subsidies, NIMBY challenges, and taking more rural lands.

• Produces major new tax revenue to create a steady funding source for affordable housing programs & homelessness.

• Shifts our housing industry away from underutilized high-end investment properties toward homes that are available and affordable to local residents. 

• Helps control and potentially even lower our rapidly increasing housing prices, as the tax will help discourage outside investors and speculation. 

• Helps control rental prices, as landlords who wish to avoid the tax will need to offer reasonable rent prices to secure long term local renters.

• Helps the City’s efforts to control proliferation of vacation home rentals.

• Helps Hawaii’s residents, since Oahu residents who are homeowners and renters will not experience higher taxes for their home, so it will not increase their cost of housing.

 

Several jurisdictions have recently adopted empty home taxes to help achieve some of these same benefits, including in California, Canada, and other locales.  

 

The Vancouver Experience

 

Honolulu’s Bill 46 (2024) is most closely modeled on Vancouver’s empty homes tax.  

 

What benefits has Vancouver seen?  

 

In the last 6 years, their empty homes tax raised over $140 million revenues for affordable housing projects, while vacant homes have decreased by 54%.  That revenue is based on a small fraction of the number of empty homes that Oahu has, so we expect Oahu’s revenues to be much higher. 

 

 

 

 

For questions or comments, please contact us at info@hihousing.org.