A city near Fishers Island is currently considering a Vacant Home Tax, but they call it the "luxury pied-à-terre surcharge" instead
The podcast for https://doorcountypulse.com/podcast-a-housing-trust-model-from-fishers-island/ discusses a housing trust on an island not far from New York City. The island has about ten times as many seasonal residents as year-round residents.
New York City itself is considering a vacant home tax which would only be applied to high value properties. Because the state of New York has an income tax, there is an established pattern where out-of-state people invest in real estate within New York while enjoying a de-facto subsidy.
By avoiding state income tax, but owning property where the services are paid for partly out of New York income tax receipts, out-of-staters get more government services than they pay for out of their property taxes.
Details about the Vacant Home Tax are described by the city comptroller under Proposal 2: Luxury pied-à-terre surcharge
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/raising-revenues/
It is modeled off of this bill, which didn’t become law:
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/S44
This bill was written to apply only to cities with a population of one million or more. Local governments are allowed to make whatever additional exemptions to the tax that they see fit. For purposes of determining which properties are valuable enough to qualify for the tax, a five-year average is used.
The bill was reviewed in considerable detail by a special interest group: https://fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Pied-a-Terre-FPI.pdf. The analysis stated that it was unlikely to cause a large shift in the real estate market. That makes sense, because the rates charged are low. If the rates were increased, the tax could curb speculation more effectively.
The state of New York has income tax rates only slightly higher by percentage than Wisconsin, so the argument about closing a tax loophole for out-of-state property owners applies in Wisconsin too. But the tax imbalance in Wisconsin has added perniciousness, in that Wisconsin, unlike New York state, has a PRAT tax in some communities. With the PRAT, tourist spending lightens the property tax burden. So less-wealthy tourists, often from elsewhere in Wisconsin, end up boosting the real estate investments made by more-wealthy out-of-state property owners. Not only do out-of-state property owners avoid Wisconsin income tax, they also save on property tax because of the PRAT.
The state of Wisconsin also misses out in another way, because some people who spent their working years in the state find it convenient upon retirement to change their legal residence to Florida, which has no income tax. They may also seasonally relocate between their Wisconsin and Florida properties. If Wisconsin were to pass a Vacant Home Tax for the whole state, it should help discourage this pattern.
The current tax structure encourages more real estate speculation, driving up prices, which then serves as a drag on the non-real-estate part of the economy.
If a Vacant Home Tax would help the state or city of New York to some degree, it stands to reason that it would help places in Wisconsin impacted by the PRAT even more.
Because Wisconsin has a lot of spendy real estate in smaller communities, the population exclusion would need to be omitted from a Wisconsin version of this bill. Rather, state legislators could decide to have all counties throughout the state collect the tax, or they could specify which counties are supposed to charge it. If the tax would only be for collectable by some counties, lawmakers could use a threshold based on U.S. Census values, such as these ones: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/demo/h121-22-01.pdf#page=3
Wisconsin’s average gross vacancy rate in the linked table declined from 16.4% in 2009 to 11.4% in 2021. That 16.4% figure reflects the bad economy. A sizable cut-off could allow only the counties with a consistently high vacancy rate to collect the tax, not just counties which reach higher vacancy rates during bad economic conditions.
https://data.census.gov/table/ACSCP5Y2021.CP04?q=Door+County,+Wisconsin&t=Vacancy:Vacancy+Characteristics:Vacancy+Rates says that Door County has a vacancy rate of 42.9%, so it would easily meet a cutoff intended to exclude most Wisconsin counties from collecting the tax.
If Door County was allowed by the state to collect a similar surcharge, the tax should kick in at a lower property value than in New York City given that overall real estate prices are lower in Wisconsin.
Other posts about the Vacant Home Tax