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> Leftists often raise the true-but-misleading factoid that the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given day is generally much smaller than the n
by runarberg 5y ago
> Leftists often raise the true-but-misleading factoid that the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given day is generally much smaller than the number of homes that are unoccupied on any given day.
> But as we covered [...] it’s not the case that homelessness is high where vacancy rates are high.
I wonder if the author is willfully ignorant here. The point leftists are making is not that of correlation and causation, but that of the lack of political will. The point is that we could solve homelessness today if there was a political will. The point is usually along the lines of: “Homelessness is a really solvable problem, see if we used all the vacant housing we could house every single homeless person, sometimes many times over”. There is no correlation nor causation in this argument. And the point is so obvious I can’t imagine how the author got their reading into it, other then blanket dismissal of arguments from the political left.
> I know it’s a little bit counterintuitive to people, but in a broad sense, the biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos.
> market-rate housing generates tax revenue by bringing in new affluent residents, and that revenue can be used to finance an affordable housing trust fund or new public housing or whatever else you want.
Here we go. The author seems to be proposing a trickle-down theory of housing. I’m not an economist but I’ve heard that trickle down theory is not the best economic theory we have. In fact I was under the impression that such theories were heavily biased by willful thinking, and have no basis in reality.
If this were to be true there would need to be a political will to actually spend the hopefully increased tax revenue on housing, however we have no reason to believe that would be the case. And that goes back to the author’s misinterpretation in the previous quotes. If there was a political will, governments would buy up the existing vacant housing and use them to house the homeless.
- lwf 5y agoThis is addressed directly in the article via economic theory, comparative analysis, and "detailed empirical work" (from studying cases where new housing was built and the observed effect on prices): From the article: > When I first started making the case for land use reform, we had two legs to our argument. One was basic economic theory — more supply equals less scarcity equals lower prices. The other was cross-sectional analysis — metro areas with laxer land use regulation see more construction and lower prices. But we can now add a third leg to that analysis in terms of detailed empirical work. [...] >> We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6 percent relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially.
- Seattle3503 5y agoThe vacant housing and the homeless people are in different places. You would need to forcibly relocate people to use that vacant housing.