Readers sometimes miss elements in an article and take a stance that reflects either abysmal misunderstanding or personal bias. Such is Frans Said’s reaction (November 23) to my recent article on a specific type of property tax.

It was good to see Said agreeing with me on the absolute need for an urgent inventory of who owns every single square inch of property and land. It would be on the basis of such a cadastre that a specifically structured tax on long-vacant and unutilised property would have to be structured.

So, if he is worried about the still-being-used own houses, summer houses, houses for marriage of sons or daughters, then he should dispel such worries. But beyond that he laments what he describes as the jigsaw puzzles, or the anomalies, of inner cities. It would be precisely one of the objectives of such property taxation to start dismantling scenarios of abandonment, dereliction, long-drawn-out feuding, environmental decadence, kerrejja style conditions and other long-vacant properties.

He is oblivious to the fact that these are wasting away economic assets and no self-respecting nation can allow them to go to waste in this manner when it is possible to create ways of getting such properties to be restructured or changed in their decadent nature. And property taxation is one such method.

Both IMF and EU recognise this principle. Said even mentioned the “grand old houses, mainly in the Sliema area, occupied by a single aged person at ridiculous rent”.

But an occupied property would not fall under my proposed form of property tax. However if, when the occupant dies, the heirs do not agree on what is to be done with the house within a set period, then the State should not allow such wastage to carry on. Taxing the owners of such property may indeed be a way of getting done what really and truly needs to be done.

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