Perth Voice Interactive

FOR the first time owners of vacant blocks in Vincent were charged double rates this year.

Fed up with empty lots plaguing the city like broken teeth, mayor John Carey proposed the plan to encourage landowners to do something constructive with their land.

“There is a cost to the community,” he says. “Vacant blocks can be unsightly, unkempt, and it’s demoralising to a town centre.”

Several attract vandals and homeless people: in January police found a meth lab had been set up in a power substation on a vacant Carr Street block.

Mr Carey acknowledges the extra rates are only a slight sting to wealthy captains of industry sitting on vast tracts of land but he still hopes “it is a slight disincentive”.

It’ll apply to any land sitting vacant at the time of the rates assessment.

by DAVID BELL