Suppose I my tenant leaves. I make the calculation that it'd be cheaper to sell the building. No one wants to buy it because it's missing a tenant. It stays unused, depressing the area around it. That depression, in turn, makes companies much more likely to fold if a tenant leaves. This makes more companies fold, which increases the likelihood that more companies will fold. Eventually, the entire area will be poison and not even under the most generous of rent agreements will either tenants or companies want to do business there.
No one wants to buy it because it's missing a tenant.
At some price someone will decide that the building is a worth while risk. You might not like that price, but there will be a price you like more than getting hit with high taxes for owning an empty building. The point here though is not to keep you, the landlord, rich; it's to make a city full of shops with happy customers, taxable sales, etc. If you can't make your building work for you then your business has failed and you need to move aside to let someone else use that real estate asset. That's how capitalism works.
That just begs the question: why can't we leave the system as is, because at some price, the tax assessment on a vacant building without any tenant revenue will push the landlord to offer a lease price for which there is demand?
Because the timeframe of the system's feedback loop is too long. By the time the landlord reacts and accepts a lower price point, the customers might have had to move on to a different location, or the business operators too.
The whole reason we even have cycles of growth and contraction is because feedback loops are too slow so we always react too slowly, and when we do we over correct. But that might be an unsolvable problem and just a fact of nature.
Agreed with everything except the last sentence. Pure capitalism will let some buildings sit idle. But I think many people believe that pure capitalism optimized for things other than human well-being.
