Debates at Toronto city hall over new taxes are usually dangerous affairs. Taxes, implemented carelessly, can hurt people who are already struggling with the cost of living in our stupidly expensive city. For Mayor John Tory and city councillors, new taxes can also be bad politics — one wrong move and their re-election hopes are toast.

So Tory and council will be glad to hear their next major debate on a new tax will be super simple. Stress-free. Just kick back and vote for it.

There should be no doubt about taxing the hell out of vacant homes.

The notion of a vacant home tax is back in the news these days after Councillor Ana Bailao pitched the idea of including one in the city’s 2020 budget, along with an increase to the municipal land transfer tax charged on luxury homes.

The city’s budget, unveiled in draft form last Friday, is balanced but wobbly. It relies on some assumptions about provincial and federal funding that may not materialize, and even with Tory’s increase to property taxes to pay for transit and housing it still shows the repair backlogs for infrastructure getting worse. Some extra cash could create some breathing room.

And a tax on empty homes looks to be an ideal way to get it.

I was a skeptic when city hall first studied the notion of taxing unused property in 2017, but the experience of our pals in Vancouver has been educational.

Their Empty Homes Tax, approved in 2016, is simple. Every person who owns a house or condo needs to complete a form each year declaring that their property is either occupied or vacant. If you’re just letting your property sit empty for more than six months of the year, you are subject to a tax currently set at 1.25% of the assessed value.

Enforcement isn’t complicated either. Each year, some homes are selected for audit. If property owners haven’t been truthful, the city will charge a whopping $10,000 a day until the mistake is fixed.

Easy, right? And it’s paying off. According to the most recent numbers, released in November, Vancouver has raised $39.7 million in net revenue since it implemented the tax. At the same time, the tax has also seemed to motivate some property owners to stop being lazy and start finding tenants. The number of declared vacant homes dropped by 22 per cent.

It’s impossible to say exactly how much a tax like this would raise in Toronto, but it’s a safe bet there are a lot of empty homes in the city that would be paying up. A 2018 city hall report found that between 15,000 to 28,000 of Toronto’s approximately 752,000 homes have low water and hydro usage, suggesting they could be vacant. Last fall, a Toronto resident used a camera setup to watch for lights inside units at five downtown condo buildings and estimated an unoccupied rate of 5.6 per cent.

Some owners of vacant units may have legitimate reasons for not using them. They could be in the hospital, or the homes may be in the process of being renovated. Exemptions should be permitted in these cases. But many empty homes are undoubtedly owned by people who are using them as part of an investment portfolio — holding them until they’re ready to cash in.

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Those owners deserve no sympathy. They are taking houses out of Toronto’s strained housing market. It takes a lot of gall to leave a perfectly good home vacant while more than 7,000 people are sleeping in shelters or on the street each night.

So city hall should not delay. Council should approve a vacant home tax with its 2020 budget and put the money toward affordable housing, shelters and the parts of the budget that could use a boost. Let there be no tolerance for landlords who shelter only their own wealth. Tax them and tax them hard.