This further leads to a situation where it’s often more economically viable to leave a house empty (and therefore not have to maintain the property or deal with tenants) while the value grows and the tax is written down.

Functionally what happened in East Asia, with "Investment Property" glut leading to the Evergrande bankruptcy, the current Seoul real estate bubble, and the 1990s Chiyoda-ku bubble which valued downtown Tokyo at a higher price than the entire nation of Canada.

Housing reform has been on the menu across the Pacific Rim for decades, thanks to the bid-price of land wildly outpacing its utility value.