“This groundbreaking tool has helped move thousands of homes back onto the rental market to help house our neighbors, but there are still too many homes that remain empty,” he said last year, when announcing a tripling of the tax.

There’s also been no notable improvement in the availability of condos for rent. The vacancy rate in the broader Vancouver metropolitan area was 0.8% in 2020, up slightly from 0.3% the previous year, according to the federal housing agency. The city had hoped the tax would push vacancy rates as high as 5%, but any new stock has been quickly absorbed.

Meanwhile, rents have continued to rise. The average condo rent in the area rose by 1.1% to C$1,914 last year during the pandemic, even as demand for housing waned when students left town and migration to the region stopped.

While Vancouver doesn’t provide a detailed breakdown of the values of the empty properties, the aggregate data suggests they are concentrated on the high end. In 2019, the latest year for which figures were available, the average assessed value of a vacant single-family house was C$3.5 million, compared with the C$2.3 million for such houses across the city.

Those homes don’t translate into cheap rentals.

“Don’t think you’re going to solve working-class housing affordability by imposing these taxes,” said Thomas Davidoff, professor of real estate finance at the University of British Columbia. “Foreign-buying, and especially empty-home owning, is concentrated at the high end.”

An analysis of the data from the taxes by statistician Jens von Bergmann, who runs a Vancouver-based data-analysis firm, and Nathanael Lauster, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, found that pieds-à-terre left empty by overseas owners were probably never as common in Canada as people assumed. Miami, New York, Houston, Phoenix, Chicago and San Francisco proportionally have far more vacancies than Vancouver, the study said.

Many of the homes that appear empty actually qualify for exemptions from the taxes, such as the owner being in medical care or traveling, or the property undergoing major construction work.

“We have questions about whether empty homes taxes are being oversold as solutions to the broader housing crises,” von Bergmann and Lauster wrote. “Empty-homes taxes are a pretty good tax. Consider it as equivalent to a bump up to property taxes.”

They caution: “Just ensure expectations are set accordingly.”