[hackerspaces] [Eviction] Call for Support for les Hauts Lieux

[Christopher J. Pilkington]

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Nick Farr (hackerspaces.org) wrote:
> 1) Commercial landlords are generally the least imaginative and most
> risk-averse of all businesspeople.  They don't make money by working.
> Commercial real estate is sort of like buying stocks, you just expect
> it to be there, making you money.  Not having a tenant is kind of like
> holding a stock that tanked after you bought it in the hopes it will
> recover.  The stockholder waits for the stock to go up.  The
> commercial landlord waits for the tenant that will just be there,
> writing checks.  Several years is not a long time for a commercial
> landlord to wait.

Here in Syracuse (.ny.us, not Sicily), we see landlords holding
properties vacant, claiming the market rate rents are x, when there is
no market to support such a rent.  I suspect this happens elsewhere in US.

I suspect that these landlords then claim business losses on their taxes
for these unoccupied properties.  I don't understand the tax code very
well, but maybe someone can back up my suspicions.  This sounds like a
very easy way to manufacture business loss, and arbitrarily exempt an
entity from almost all if not all tax.

I wonder if there also exists a way of getting out of some portion of
property taxes when a commercial property is unoccupied.

Syracuse is (or at least has been) notorious for corruption w.r.t.
commercial real estate.  The prime example is the Destiny USA project,
which is essentially a Disney World-esque mall which has not come to
fruition, yet the City has exempted the project from taxes for something
like 50 years.  The current status of this project is that Citigroup has
frozen its financing because the developer cannot demonstrate a single
prospective tenant for the new space that has been built to date.  (Note
also that said new space was built using eminent domain to take existing
leaseholder rights.)

- -cjp
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