"Buildings razed to avoid taxes"

I covered this topic a while ago here, but it's always worth revisiting:

A Communities and Local Government spokesperson said that reforms to empty property relief were "aimed at ensuring a fairer balance between incentives to re-let property, and giving property owners a period of relief while they manage vacancies. This follows recommendations by independent experts to encourage the most efficient use of land..."

The Land Value Taxers have always said that if you want to "encourage the most efficient use of land" (i.e. build the biggest building possible) the best thing you can do is to tax the site value and ignore the value of buildings and improvements; if you tax buildings, so goes the theory, there'll be fewer buildings. Only it's not just theory is it? This is what actually happens. Or as Dearieme (no Land Value Taxer he!) said in the comments to my earlier post, "Have the stupid f***ers never heard of the Window Tax?".

And what's this crap about 'giving property owners a period of relief'? Do banks give commercial landlords a 'period of relief' if they can't find tenants? I think not. There may be some bizarre maths that says commercial landlords might be better off by knocking down buildings, but seeing as economics is about putting things to their optimum use, a tax system that encourages this is clearly fundamentally flawed.

Which leads the discussion on to vacant new-built but unsold residential property. It appears that there is an exemption (Class C) for 6 months after completion, so all the developer has to do is leave the new properties not-quite-finished, hopefully they won't be knocking them all down again.