The Washington Business Journal reports reports that on Tuesday, the Council eliminated the vacant property tax rate altogether and replaced it with a ten dollar rate that will apply only to blighted properties. A blighted property is “unsafe, insanitary, or which is otherwise determined to threaten the public health, safety, or general welfare of the community” because of broken walls, roofs, windows, balconies or other poorly kept features. According to the Business Journal, boarded up properties will also count as blighted. Owners of well-maintained vacant properties, including vacant lots, will pay the regular commercial and residential rates.
We have witnessed a lot of positive change as a result of the vacant property tax -- numerous properties have been sold and/or renovated in the past few years. Arguably, many of the vacant properties to which we often point with ire (e.g., Michael Sendar's properties at 9th, Q and Rhode Island Avenue, Shiloh's, etc.) qualify as blight under the new standard, so hopefully we will continue to see change resulting from the tax liabilities of the new law. Time will tell how the new Blight Tax plays out.
6 comments:
i'm not optimistic that this will change things for the better. if the city had such a hard time defining "vacant" (which seems pretty straightforward to me), i can only imagine the clusterf*** that is coming from them trying to define "blight"
agreed...
double agreed. watch how fast shiloh takes their "well maintained" property off the market now.
Another "plan" with good intentions that will be poorly executed by DC due to its subjectivity...Michael Sendar, Warren Williams and Shiloh can all breathe easily...we've returned to square one.
This is a HUGE improvement for many innocent people. I have had clients nailed with $40,000 tax bills because the house was vacant for years before they bought it and someone from DCRA drove by and saw a for sale sign and recorded the house as vacant (they would peek in windows to see if furniture was in the house (classic DC - punish the do-gooders!). Also had clients reported for vacant house when it had just been gut job reno'd for resale and was a fabulous $800K house - the dingbats at DCRA just labeled everything vacant. Not saying DC doesn't have a problem enforcing the laws against the creeps who leave buildings abandoned - but this is a major fix of an unmitigated disaster when they changed it to "vacant".
Anon@Sept.29 is right on. Those of you who thought the vacant tax was a good thing were never victimized by this loose and entirely subjective law.
As this poster explained, people who were improving properties -- hence removing blight and increasing neighborhood property values -- got assessed a "vacancy tax" because some DC employee didn't see people living inside. In many cases, the mere act of moving out along with bad timing of an inspector coming by got the new owner hit with this tax, even if only a few days transpired before they moved in.
The intention of the old law was good; the execution was terrible. It had to go and it's good to see that city official finally listened. that's better than I can say for most of these posters here.
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