Why? Because apparently they need some more incentive to keep units occupied. Also, even though a property might be vacant, there’s still imputed rental income there. Its owner is just receiving it in the form of enjoying the unit for himself instead of receiving an actual rent check from a tenant. That imputed rent ought to be taxed like any other income.
You don’t need to adjust for income. How do you get high value land with a low income? How do you own high value land and not derive an income from it? You’re imagining an extreme edge case of some family that’s been passing high value land down, generation after generation, without ever leveraging this advantage into financial success.
The more valuable the property, the larger a component of that value that tends to be in the value of the location itself, as opposed to the capital improvements to that location. Low income housing, as cheaply built as it is, is built in an even cheaper location. Conversely, a house but for higher income people is built more expensively, but even greater is the access to good schools, jobs, shopping, low (blue collar) crime rates, and so on that a high value location provides.
And that’s just residential real estate, which is almost people even think about. With commercial and industrial sites, location becomes even more important.
People who talk this way don’t know what land value is. They imagine there is a relationship to quantity, when location is almost the entire driver. Maybe a thousand square feet of space in upper Manhattan or San Jose or something is comparable to a hundred acres in rural Wyoming, or wherever.
And what about the poor in cities? They already pay a land value tax… to the owners of the land. You will say that if the owners are taxed, they will raise rents… but if they can just raise rents like that, why haven’t they already? Normally, a tax can be “passed on” because a tax on a thing affects the supply of that thing: the tax raises costs, which lowers profits, which drives capital out of that industry and into another, which reduces the amount being produced, which allows the higher price.
But land is fixed in supply. If you’re imagining a way of increasing or reducing the supply, you’re not thinking about land, but capital improvement to it. The supply can be neither increased nor decreased. Its existence is not dependent on any industry or thrift or other service on the part of the landowner and, as such, any income derived simply from owning a location and leasing it out to others is unearned. It’s essentially extortion, one person renting to another the “privilege” of existing, and if there are any landowners not collecting the full value that can be collected, it is either because they haven’t found the highest price yet, or out of the kindness of their hearts.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. My property tax bill has separate components for the land and the improvements upon it. I’m sure that a larger portion of my income goes to paying it than some of my neighbors.