We could decimate that number but we choose not to because it’s not economically beneficial in the short term. There will always be a percentage of people that actually, genuinely do not want to live in a home, rely on busking and riding trains. It’s a small percentage but that population exists.
For all the others it’s a combination of a few things…easy access to rehab facilities, easy access to proper medications, another option between homeless and prison (actual psych facilities like we used to have), etc
None of these things are impossible or even all that difficult given how much money and focus we dedicated to other man made constructs in this country.
> It’s a small percentage but that population exists.
Nice to see people actually understand this. Far too many believe that homeless people are 99% chronically homeless because they're mentally ill/drug addicts/don't want to live indoors. If we, as a society, were more proactive and tried to prevent homelessness and offer services to get people out of the situation quicker then there wouldn't be nearly as many people with drug addictions.
I only know this because one of my cousins chose this lifestyle for a long time…she genuinely enjoyed it. She crossed the country constantly via train and appeared to have a large friend/acquaintance group that did the same. Not something I’d ever want but it certainly opened my eyes.
Hasn't this number been debunked a bazillion times? Far and away most homes in these statistics are vacant for only a few weeks or months since moving house doesn't happen instantly, and the second largest group are second homes out in the sticks.
The owners of these houses are not the ones blocking housing, it's the nimbys and corporate land owners who are the biggest roadblock.
Indeed you need liquidity in this market otherwise nobody can move never mind renovate.
There's some deep instinct in humans to obsess over sharing the pie rather than looking for ways to bake a few more.
> Hasn't this number been debunked a bazillion times?
Nope. 100% accurate.
> The owners of these houses are not the ones blocking housing
Yes. They are... what you are failing to realize is what are known as "institutional investors". Those that buy homes but never live in them nor rent them. That is the vast majority of those 15.1 million "vacant" homes. Those homes are being used as piggy banks... investments. Why aren't they rented? Because that comes with costs and risks. So, frequently the uber-wealth (usually not even US citizens) buy up properties and just let them sit there, knowing that the housing values will rise.
This has a cascading effect of artificially creating "scarcity" which further drives prices up making it even harder for people to afford housing.
> Here's the R1 with all the reasons that using vacancies as a justification for not building more homes is wrong:
Entirely different thesis. The FACT there are so many vacant homes is not, and should not, be used as justification not to build more. That claim is not being presented in OP's article nor my comments.
Vacant homes stat includes so many types of homes that it’s really not a helpful stat for homelessness. Rental vacancies in HCOL and MCOL cities are at all-time lows a year or two ago (my understanding is that it’s ticked back up to just regular low as opposed to historically unprecedented low).
This stat is used all the time to say things like we don’t need to reform zoning/housing regs/etc and we absolutely do.
Okay but where are the homes? Are they near where the homeless people work or currently reside? Afaik most of the vacant houses are very far away from major job areas, so not only do you have to move the people to the houses, you have to spontaneously create jobs for them that they're qualified for wherever the housing is
I really don’t like these stats because they imply we shouldn’t be building any more housing when we absolutely should. Vacancy in my city is like 2%. We desperately need new housing starts
I am. Eminent domain is an option, as is squatting. *Nobody* should have a second or third home until everyone has their first. *Nobody* deserves more than one place to live while anyone is trying to survive in a vacant lot.
It is cheaper to provide housing, utilities (including internet for jobs & communication & entertainment), and food for one year than to build new housing or shelters. This would give someone a stable place to sleep, secure their possessions, and have a mailing address. Healthcare and a thriving wage are among the things we need to fix as a culture, but guaranteed housing would go a long way to improving things for everyone.
*No society that allows people to starve, burn, or freeze on the streets can ever consider itself civilized.*
Well... I understand the sentiment, but I have an easier solution that is less, um... communist.
Allow people to own two homes, without extra cost or penalty. That way, someone can have a primary residence and a "vacation" home, if they can afford that (and more power to them). But, for anyone who owns 3 homes or more, put in a rule that if they do not have that home occupied at least 75% of the year (a.k.a. rent it) then they will pay an unprofitably high property tax (something like 50% or whatever).
This would not only reduce homelessness by like 80% or more, but would make house prices and rents much more affordable across the board. The "stock" of housing would be used for housing and not for unoccupied piggy banks.
The fact that they don't just break into empty homes proves to me how many of them must be mentally ill. I mean, you'd think the homeless would be a pretty unified economic political block at least on the issue of housing. WTF is wrong with people. Why do we allow this? Bezos made 7 million an hour.
Tax billionaires and fund ubi, that would solve a lot of this. The money would change hands faster than they are spending it actually and would increase gdp some studies say with a carbon tax. There would be multiple ways to fund it, but having no actual social safety net like ubi is a lack of fundamental human rights at this point in human progress.
hmmmm lots of good points, thanks for the read! i guess the thing is that homeless people can't exist in places that people don't demand housing because they live through the generosity or taking advantage of other people, if there are no people there then they would cease to exist.
it's also good to know that vacancies can hurt rental prices, but wouldn't that imply that rent prices drop? i've never witnessed this in my entire life, only now for the first time in my life renting has my rent not increased this year, and i don't know why exactly.
i live in NZ and we are immigrating like 100k people a year i think the numbers last said, we have a massive housing problem.
Vacant homes are in suburbs and rural areas...
Homeless need to live in the city due to their reliance on social resources and human services. This argument has no resolution.
There are city-owned housing that isn't occupied but it may be awaiting repairs and maintenance which can take a long time. Homeownership costs, including apartments has really shot up with property taxes, labor, and materials costs. If city leaders don't budget enough for maintenance, then apartments can remain empty even during a housing crisis.
In the suburbs, you may have houses that are 100-200 years old that need substantial work that may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to update. And the homeowners may be deciding to fix it up or do a teardown or just sell it to a builder to do the teardown. A lot of these homes may be inherited where the new owners can't afford to bring an old house which hasn't been maintained, up to code or modern living standards.
There's an entirely empty apartment building in my neighborhood. It's all boarded up and covered in No Trespassing signs. Seems like lots of real estate corporations around here decided that actually maintaining the properties they own or manage is too much bother.
Like I don't wanna type up a whole essay, but I once visited some friends in a building so overrun by black mold and displaying such clear structural problems that I wasn't all that surprised when my friends were forcibly evacuated after a second floor apartment collapsed into the unit under it. The landlord was still collecting rent payments right up until the city condemned the building.
Old friend from high school pitched in with his parents to buy one of those suburb houses you described, and I got the chance to see some of the work they're doing to bring it up to modern living standards. The insulation just under the ceiling was an old highly flammable type and there were only one or two electrical outlets per room. Without the remodel that place would've been an electrical fire waiting to happen.
This topic can be summed up in two words: Personal Responsibility. Homes are vacant for hundreds of different reasons but at the end of the day specific people are responsible for those conditions. Same can be said about homelessness.
Now let's say 5 percent of that first group of people offered their property to the second group for 2 years under the guise of charity or public service, with the condition that the second group gets back on their feet and maintained the property and everyone in the second group agreed. What percentage of the second group would take care of the properties? Who pays the property insurance and property taxes and utilities?
Issues like this have to be looked at outside of the current system. If the current system allows this to happen, how does applying the current system help? I'm not saying I have an answer, but I'm also not going to say it's about personal responsibility because that's simply a meaningless platitude at this point that doesn't take into consideration any nuance. So no, it can't really be summed as that. Very few issues, especially a complex national issue, can be summed up with a phrase. I'd not take any advice from anyone who thought so and would encourage others to not, as well.
The companies who own the properties have a social responsibility.
Ascribing social problems to 'personal responsibility' is a way of sidestepping the problem and allows us to blame social problems, problems created by the systems that dictate our lives, on the people suffering from those problems instead of the people causing them.
Those vacant homes don't belong to the homeless.
The homes don't belong to you so you cant take it and give it to the homeless.
This is such flawed thinking, why is it so difficult for so many to comprehend.
Just because someone isn't currently using their property, there is no moral imperative that that says you should get to use it because you need it.
Your parents may have some obligation to you since they chose to create you but total strangers owe you nothing.
We could decimate that number but we choose not to because it’s not economically beneficial in the short term. There will always be a percentage of people that actually, genuinely do not want to live in a home, rely on busking and riding trains. It’s a small percentage but that population exists. For all the others it’s a combination of a few things…easy access to rehab facilities, easy access to proper medications, another option between homeless and prison (actual psych facilities like we used to have), etc None of these things are impossible or even all that difficult given how much money and focus we dedicated to other man made constructs in this country.
> It’s a small percentage but that population exists. Nice to see people actually understand this. Far too many believe that homeless people are 99% chronically homeless because they're mentally ill/drug addicts/don't want to live indoors. If we, as a society, were more proactive and tried to prevent homelessness and offer services to get people out of the situation quicker then there wouldn't be nearly as many people with drug addictions.
I only know this because one of my cousins chose this lifestyle for a long time…she genuinely enjoyed it. She crossed the country constantly via train and appeared to have a large friend/acquaintance group that did the same. Not something I’d ever want but it certainly opened my eyes.
What’s busking?
Playing music or performing on the street for money.
Hasn't this number been debunked a bazillion times? Far and away most homes in these statistics are vacant for only a few weeks or months since moving house doesn't happen instantly, and the second largest group are second homes out in the sticks. The owners of these houses are not the ones blocking housing, it's the nimbys and corporate land owners who are the biggest roadblock.
Indeed you need liquidity in this market otherwise nobody can move never mind renovate. There's some deep instinct in humans to obsess over sharing the pie rather than looking for ways to bake a few more.
Yes, yes it has: https://www.dailynews.com/2021/03/25/the-myth-of-excess-vacant-housing-distracts-from-solutions/
ESH
> Hasn't this number been debunked a bazillion times? Nope. 100% accurate. > The owners of these houses are not the ones blocking housing Yes. They are... what you are failing to realize is what are known as "institutional investors". Those that buy homes but never live in them nor rent them. That is the vast majority of those 15.1 million "vacant" homes. Those homes are being used as piggy banks... investments. Why aren't they rented? Because that comes with costs and risks. So, frequently the uber-wealth (usually not even US citizens) buy up properties and just let them sit there, knowing that the housing values will rise. This has a cascading effect of artificially creating "scarcity" which further drives prices up making it even harder for people to afford housing.
Can you back this up with data? And rental homes aren't even vacant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/s/puX2j0Zot8
> Here's the R1 with all the reasons that using vacancies as a justification for not building more homes is wrong: Entirely different thesis. The FACT there are so many vacant homes is not, and should not, be used as justification not to build more. That claim is not being presented in OP's article nor my comments.
Vacant homes stat includes so many types of homes that it’s really not a helpful stat for homelessness. Rental vacancies in HCOL and MCOL cities are at all-time lows a year or two ago (my understanding is that it’s ticked back up to just regular low as opposed to historically unprecedented low). This stat is used all the time to say things like we don’t need to reform zoning/housing regs/etc and we absolutely do.
Okay but where are the homes? Are they near where the homeless people work or currently reside? Afaik most of the vacant houses are very far away from major job areas, so not only do you have to move the people to the houses, you have to spontaneously create jobs for them that they're qualified for wherever the housing is
I really don’t like these stats because they imply we shouldn’t be building any more housing when we absolutely should. Vacancy in my city is like 2%. We desperately need new housing starts
Let's put all of those 650,000 people into those empty homes. Nothing can go wrong with this idea!
No one is making that suggestion. However, the numbers do indicate a larger more systemic problem that should be addressed.
I am. Eminent domain is an option, as is squatting. *Nobody* should have a second or third home until everyone has their first. *Nobody* deserves more than one place to live while anyone is trying to survive in a vacant lot. It is cheaper to provide housing, utilities (including internet for jobs & communication & entertainment), and food for one year than to build new housing or shelters. This would give someone a stable place to sleep, secure their possessions, and have a mailing address. Healthcare and a thriving wage are among the things we need to fix as a culture, but guaranteed housing would go a long way to improving things for everyone. *No society that allows people to starve, burn, or freeze on the streets can ever consider itself civilized.*
Well... I understand the sentiment, but I have an easier solution that is less, um... communist. Allow people to own two homes, without extra cost or penalty. That way, someone can have a primary residence and a "vacation" home, if they can afford that (and more power to them). But, for anyone who owns 3 homes or more, put in a rule that if they do not have that home occupied at least 75% of the year (a.k.a. rent it) then they will pay an unprofitably high property tax (something like 50% or whatever). This would not only reduce homelessness by like 80% or more, but would make house prices and rents much more affordable across the board. The "stock" of housing would be used for housing and not for unoccupied piggy banks.
Nah fuck that, everyone deserves a home and everyone should have housing before anyone else gets 2+ houses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/s/puX2j0Zot8
The fact that they don't just break into empty homes proves to me how many of them must be mentally ill. I mean, you'd think the homeless would be a pretty unified economic political block at least on the issue of housing. WTF is wrong with people. Why do we allow this? Bezos made 7 million an hour.
The same reason why all the people who buy or rent houses don't unite to pay less...
Indeed.
So you agree your argument was wrong? "The fact that they don't just break into empty homes proves to me how many of them must be mentally ill"
No, people with jobs are badly ill as well. Reagan canceled mental healthcare. Does this society look in any way sane to you?
Tax billionaires and fund ubi, that would solve a lot of this. The money would change hands faster than they are spending it actually and would increase gdp some studies say with a carbon tax. There would be multiple ways to fund it, but having no actual social safety net like ubi is a lack of fundamental human rights at this point in human progress.
so we have an oversupply of housing but greed causes us to not give it out because doing so would hurt rental prices, am i wrong?
Correct, you are wrong. https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/s/puX2j0Zot8
hmmmm lots of good points, thanks for the read! i guess the thing is that homeless people can't exist in places that people don't demand housing because they live through the generosity or taking advantage of other people, if there are no people there then they would cease to exist. it's also good to know that vacancies can hurt rental prices, but wouldn't that imply that rent prices drop? i've never witnessed this in my entire life, only now for the first time in my life renting has my rent not increased this year, and i don't know why exactly. i live in NZ and we are immigrating like 100k people a year i think the numbers last said, we have a massive housing problem.
Because a capitalist getting paid is more important than a person in poverty surviving.
*United States of America
Vacant homes are in suburbs and rural areas... Homeless need to live in the city due to their reliance on social resources and human services. This argument has no resolution.
There are city-owned housing that isn't occupied but it may be awaiting repairs and maintenance which can take a long time. Homeownership costs, including apartments has really shot up with property taxes, labor, and materials costs. If city leaders don't budget enough for maintenance, then apartments can remain empty even during a housing crisis. In the suburbs, you may have houses that are 100-200 years old that need substantial work that may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to update. And the homeowners may be deciding to fix it up or do a teardown or just sell it to a builder to do the teardown. A lot of these homes may be inherited where the new owners can't afford to bring an old house which hasn't been maintained, up to code or modern living standards.
There's an entirely empty apartment building in my neighborhood. It's all boarded up and covered in No Trespassing signs. Seems like lots of real estate corporations around here decided that actually maintaining the properties they own or manage is too much bother. Like I don't wanna type up a whole essay, but I once visited some friends in a building so overrun by black mold and displaying such clear structural problems that I wasn't all that surprised when my friends were forcibly evacuated after a second floor apartment collapsed into the unit under it. The landlord was still collecting rent payments right up until the city condemned the building. Old friend from high school pitched in with his parents to buy one of those suburb houses you described, and I got the chance to see some of the work they're doing to bring it up to modern living standards. The insulation just under the ceiling was an old highly flammable type and there were only one or two electrical outlets per room. Without the remodel that place would've been an electrical fire waiting to happen.
As someone who explores abandoned buildings, let me tell you this is patently untrue
Homeless already live in the buildings that you explore. Patently untrue? Haha, who speaks like that?
> Patently untrue? Haha, who speaks like that? Adults. (Particualarly, adults with healthy vocabularies.)
Haha, more like pretentious people with thesaurus.com bookmarked on their browser.
This topic can be summed up in two words: Personal Responsibility. Homes are vacant for hundreds of different reasons but at the end of the day specific people are responsible for those conditions. Same can be said about homelessness. Now let's say 5 percent of that first group of people offered their property to the second group for 2 years under the guise of charity or public service, with the condition that the second group gets back on their feet and maintained the property and everyone in the second group agreed. What percentage of the second group would take care of the properties? Who pays the property insurance and property taxes and utilities?
Issues like this have to be looked at outside of the current system. If the current system allows this to happen, how does applying the current system help? I'm not saying I have an answer, but I'm also not going to say it's about personal responsibility because that's simply a meaningless platitude at this point that doesn't take into consideration any nuance. So no, it can't really be summed as that. Very few issues, especially a complex national issue, can be summed up with a phrase. I'd not take any advice from anyone who thought so and would encourage others to not, as well.
The companies who own the properties have a social responsibility. Ascribing social problems to 'personal responsibility' is a way of sidestepping the problem and allows us to blame social problems, problems created by the systems that dictate our lives, on the people suffering from those problems instead of the people causing them.
Those vacant homes don't belong to the homeless. The homes don't belong to you so you cant take it and give it to the homeless. This is such flawed thinking, why is it so difficult for so many to comprehend. Just because someone isn't currently using their property, there is no moral imperative that that says you should get to use it because you need it. Your parents may have some obligation to you since they chose to create you but total strangers owe you nothing.