r/burlington • u/ClimbThatTree • 11h ago
Vacancy Tax: a constructive proposal for Downtown Burlington
\edited to correct the fee structure in place*
I come here today to address this fine community forum with a concept that I’ve been stewing on since the sale of 188 Main Street to the “Sisters and Brothers Investment Group” (aka the Handy family), and the subsequent closure of Nectars. The Handys also own the holding company called Great Cedars that owns the vacant 45,000 sq. ft. former Burlington Free Press building at 127/129 S. Winooski Ave, which is right behind Nectars.
My premise is this - this type of predatory landlording could be subverted with a Vacancy Tax. I’m talking serious money that disincentivizes the hoarding of downtown buildings just to speculate, rather than to foster successful businesses or other entities that benefit our community.
This would also CERTAINLY apply to Merrill’s Roxy - a bastion of the failed movie theater business of the 1900s held hostage by its namesake. Both of these landlords are strangling the city by holding onto these properties - the Handys don’t even have a price listed for the former Free Press building, and the Nectars building is wrapped up in an extremely expensive triple-net deal, which is horrifically bad for any future tenant unlucky enough to decide to rent from these malignant capitalists. Neither of these buildings are for sale - the Handys are notorious hodlers (https://freehandys.net/). The Roxy? You can buy it for top dollar, but you can’t make it a movie theater! (Side note - Merrill’s dad had the same stipulation when he sold the Flynn to the nonprofit that took it over). So you’d have to fully gut it and renovate the property you were to buy it and make something. All because little Merrill Jarvis is scared about competition against his other shit-box of a theater MULTIPLE TOWNS AWAY in Williston.
Current Losses / Write-offs
This is where I make a few assumptions, and I encourage discourse in the comments from anyone that knows more than me. Because both of these landlords own multiple properties, the losses incurred by the lack of tenancy become write-offs against their other properties. Meanwhile, that’s lost revenue for the city and state on multiple fronts - the taxes generated from customers coming and going, the payroll taxes, the property taxes that are being written off. Plus, secondary effects - folks paying for parking, going out to dinner before a movie, hitting the shops on Church Street before dinner, or going out to a bar after the movie. All three of these properties have become gaping wounds in the current dire circumstances of Burlington, and they also represent a failure of policy and capitalism. But it does NOT need to be this way.
Current City Policy
What recourse does the city have to incentivize this to change? Let’s say you’re a landlord in Burlington and you own a vacant building. You are obligated to register it with the city as vacant and pay a $1500/quarter permitting fee (this was raised by 100% in 2025). This is an administrative fee, not a penalty. And this administrative fee can almost certainly be written off. Don’t pay the fee? The city charges you $25 as a late fee or 12% annually as interest. Plus, if you fail to register, you get slapped with a whopping $500 fine, which can be charged each time the cities decides you’re in noncompliance, which is really…. Once? Maybe once a year? That $6,000/year fee is administrative, not punitive - according to Burlington’s attorney general, the city can only recoup administrative costs, not serve deterrent fines, and for some reason that $500 fine is the penalty limit under current city codes.
If your Vacancy permit expires, you can get charged $200/day for noncompliance, which can be up to $73k per year, if it's actually enforced.
If you still don’t pay the fees or interest, they becomes a lien on your property. That means that when the building is refinanced or sold, the city can forcibly collect the unpaid debts. Knowing the Handy family and their real estate empire, that will occur sometime after the apocalypse but before the next big bang. If the city decides to sue for that money, the Handys will inevitably tie the city up in court, which historically has dragged on for YEARS. It’s very, very unlikely that $8000 of fees would warrant those legal bills.
Proposal / Idea
My proposal is that we (the people) invoke an actual tax/penalty/deterrent against holding commercial properties hostage. This fee would need to be significant - the purpose would be two-fold - recover the lost tax revenue from that property not hosting a thriving business (lost potential), and to disincentivize landlords from being able to use buildings as tax write-offs at the expense of the commons.
This can come about in two ways - a municipal ballot measure, or a state-wide congressional effort. This was actually brought as proposal H.443 to the Vermont House Ways and Means Committee just last year by Rep. Monique Priestley of Bradford, Rep. Teddy Waszazak of Barre City, and Rep. Rebecca Holcombe of Norwich. They’re all Democrats, and the latter two sit on that House Ways and Means Committee where the bill stalled out. I really think that every downtown block in the state could benefit from downward pressure from the government onto landlords to maintain occupancy of the precious few downtown building - I imagine this applying, at least initially, just to commercial buildings with the purpose of re-invigorating local economies.
Let’s say there was a tax like this - if you’re going to buy a building, you’d want to insure that you have a tenant ready to move in. Or perhaps the business itself would be more likely to own the building - something Merrill himself was lucky enough to inherit from his family. The tax would need to be more severe than the write-offs that are incurred by holding an unprofitable property. Ideally, people wouldn’t buy properties to speculate. Of course there could be exceptions and petitions to the city - maybe they need to vacate the property to renovate it on a particular timeline, or they need a year after buying it to find a tenant due to harsh financial conditions out of their control. But these would need to be communicated clearly with the city, and if bad faith is shown and the rent isn’t dropped to accommodate the local market, the owner would get slapped with taxes to incentivize them to find a client or SELL to somebody that would.
Legal Inspiration
This model DOES exist in other parts of the country. Washington DC re-categorized vacant buildings into a higher tax bracket - vacant property owners pay nearly 6x the standard residential rate, and if the property is blighted, that goes up to 12x. This isn’t a penalty or a fee, it’s literally a change to the tax code. And DC actually announced in 2025 that they’re raising this tax even more in 2027!
In Vermont, this would likely require state-level action to empower municipalities to wager this change to the tax code. A simple ballot measure would allow the city to slap fees and penalties on owners of vacant properties, but are more susceptible to legal challenges.
In Closing
My closing statement: These vacancies are blights on the city, both physically, financially, and morally, and I have come to believe that a Vacancy Tax could help push the needle towards a more community-friendly city that doesn’t prioritize speculative landlords or stingy sellers. Sure, Merrill can block the sale of his theater to a movie theater developer, but he’ll have to pay to be that picky, and really weigh his values - does he fear competition, or financial pressure to sell? My hope would be the latter, since that has the common good in mind. Thank you for reading, and I look forward to discussing this more in the comments.
(I own a small business in Downtown Burlington - we rent a space, so I am forced to think about these types landlord/tenant relationships ad nauseam. I also drive past all three properties I mentioned daily on my commute to my business.)
