183 days. You self-declare unless the government has a reason to audit. This is a solved problem already and we’ve been going by these standards for decades.
It’s called establishing a domicile in tax terminology.
It’s not on my ID, though. And even if it were, they’d need a way to monitor actual occupancy over time and there’s no way that wouldn’t be invasive.
It’s common and reasonable to be away from home for months at a time, and you have a right to travel. I can only imagine the burden this would place on someone who’s away for medical treatment or supporting a distant family member. Or just out of the house for renovations or an issue they can’t afford to fix currently.
The administrative burden alone would be huge before you get to unintended consequences.
I can still buy a car and have it just sit there. The driving part is due to affliction of other people’s well being. Me raising the money to buy a house and deciding I want it as a summer stay location, so I leave it sitting there while I’m somewhere else would have no harm on another’s life.
I believe that you should be able to keep a property empty if you choose, it should just be taxed in a way that’s proportionate to the damage it causes to the community.
Empty properties inflate housing costs -> Increased housing costs reduce the amount of people willing to live in the area -> Which reduces the amount of people able to work for local businesses.
They could now if they wanted. Most lakes are government or private property. You think they’d want to lose profit margin?
Not to mention the massive difference again, the wellbeing of other people. Houses are crafted by skilled workers, it’s not a right to their labor, nor a right to the owner’s property who purchased it after it was built. You do however have a naturalized right to survival.
The point is, property taxes are fine but saying “um you should be forced by the government to use something you own in a specific manner” is nonsensical and authoritarian overreach at minimum.