When designing the law, you just need to consider this possibility as a fraud, and then if you do this you are facing a huge fine or a prison sentence. That's how all taxes work.

Of course some people would still infringe law (#Balkany) but most would not.

I the special case of France: such a law would be really easy to apply, at or least it would without Macron's changes: as everybody living somewhere was paying the «taxe d'habitation», every house without anyone paying for inhabiting it is an empty house. And in practice, with the suppression of the «taxe d'habitation», cities could just raise the level for the «taxe foncière» and it would have the same effect as a taxe on empty houses, without any special work to do.