The part of the sentence "question has occupied" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in a variety of contexts to mean that a particular question has been the focus of attention. For example, "This question has occupied the minds of scientists for generations."
While Loudon's double detached dwelling wasn't strictly the first of its kind (that question has occupied enthusiastic Notes and Queries correspondents in the past), it was one of the earliest to be published and propagated, its principles expounded in a hugely influential book.
That question has occupied linguist Lenore Grenoble since the early 1990s, when she made her first trek to a remote area of Siberia to study Evenki, the rapidly disappearing tongue of a Siberian indigenous group.
Such questions have occupied political philosophers for centuries and have inspired important contributions by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and John Rawls.
Such questions have occupied center stage in recent epistemology (see Pritchard 2007 for an overview), nowhere more so than in the writings of virtue epistemologists, for they think their approach is uniquely suited to provide satisfying answers.
But Mr. Cuomo did not address the question of how to pay for more police, a question that has occupied Mayor David N. Dinkins and the New York City Council for weeks.
It is a question that has occupied Suelin Chen, founder and CEO of online end-of-life planning service Cake.
One question that has occupied the New York political world is why Mr. Bloomberg chose to go this indirect route — donating money to the Independence Party, which was then to pay Mr. Haggerty — for ballot security.
She began seriously contemplating a question that has occupied Silicon Valley executives for the past couple of years: Why aren't there more female programmers in the U.S., and what can be done about it?
He hoped that it might offer clues about how the genes that control human metabolism are switched on and off, a question that has occupied him for most of his career.
This is a question that has occupied physicists for decades and one for which there is still no definitive answer [3].
One of the questions that has occupied Lane's mind in the past is why mitochondrial genes migrate to the nuclear genome.
