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> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there

> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France). You seem to imply the problem is housing regulations and NIMBY preventing new constructions, but who cares when the houses are already there. I agree with you the problem is that of policy, but i would say the policy responsible for that immense suffering is "private property", the religious belief that land should be owned and that a piece of paper should dictate whether you can sleep under a roof or not and/or have access to food/healthcare/education. We can eradicate homelessness in under 48h: it's just that no politician cares at all about poverty from their ivory tower! Just give the police instruction not to intervene for "breaking and entering" in *vacant* housing (or even better, abolish police entirely) and we can rehouse every homeless person in the next two days. Of course it would take a few weeks to rehabilitate some of the housing unit and make them real decent, but even in the meantime old housing would be much better than no housing.

kapuasuite 4y ago
The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living. There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  > those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live Good point, although i would like data to back that claim. For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone: this does not account for vacant industrial/office space which could also be converted to housing. In all cases, *proposing* (without coercion) homeless people a house somewhere does not sound inhumane at all. > there are far more people living in overcrowded housing Good point, too. Although as i said i would like to see data suggesting that the current real estate market (accounting for all vacant units) can't house everyone decently. > There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners. To be clear, i'm not saying we should stop building houses entirely. But as long as you allow housing to remain vacant, prices are driven by speculation not by actual supply. I believe we should both rehouse homeless people immediately and keep investing in eco-friendly collective, affordable housing.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone Source? A quick search only turns a figure half of that: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-paris-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-par... Also, just because it's "vacant" doesn't mean it can actually be used to house homeless people. It could be undergoing renovations, or on the rental market.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      10% doesn't seem entirely reasonable. Maybe bit high, but still if the vacancy is because renovation, waiting for new tenants either renters or owners. You want some slack in any market. And ofc, there is some number of second or third properties in cities like Paris. Maybe part of solution would be to ban these and AirBnB entirely. Only allow hotels and like to exist.
- carapace 4y ago
  Anecdote: I live in Park Merced: > Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississippi River after Park La Brea in Los Angeles. It was a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments in southwestern San Francisco for middle-income tenants. It contains 3,221 residences (after sale of five blocks to San Francisco State University (SFSU)) and over 9,000 residents, and is one of four remaining privately owned large-scale garden apartment complexes in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Merced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Merced On my block, just on my street, there are over a dozen empty garden apartments, 2- and 3-bedrooms, that have been empty since (more-or-less) the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. Folks started leaving and no one has moved back in. Next to my house there are three empty apt.'s to the left, one to the right, and four across the street. The owners haven't lowered rents though. The theory is that they would rather keep the rents high and the apartments empty than lower the rents because if they do that it affects their ability to raise rents later on (rent control is the only way I afford to still live here. For better or worse my family pays less than half the market rate. However, as I am describing, the market rate is not "clearing the demand" or whatever the economic jargon would be. No one is renting at "market" rate right now.) The other problem is that rents going down affect the valuation of the property, something like that. IANAEconomist. Anyway... There are literally hundreds of perfectly fine apartments ready to rent here in Park Merced, with the M line light rail going directly to downtown SF in about 20-30 minutes and a BART station in walking distance. - - - - Get this. Some folks moved in to the place across the street on Monday, but then Wednesday the staff was here kicking them out: they were squatters. I spoke to one of the staff who told me that this was a group of people who were breaking in and squatting in units all over the property, that they had changed the locks on the house they tried to squat in, and that he had called the police, who asked if anyone was being violent (no) and then still hadn't shown up an hour later! They never did show up. The squatters moved all their stuff and their two dogs back into their vehicles and left.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Seems like rent controls are the issues. Causing markets to be inefficient. No surprises there. Get rid of them and maybe supply increases as it can better match demand and capability of renters to pay.
throw1234651234 4y ago
"This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France)." I always wonder about public transportation. It never really took off in the US, but it IS way more efficient. If we had very fast subways / trains, we could theoretically stretch housing way out away from the city. Then there is more equal opportunity for jobs / attending universities without living on campus. I know this is a bit off topic, but it always seems to me like having QUALITY public transportation is efficient, but I can't quite defend it. Not even to the exclusion of cars. For example I know a lot of workers who drive their car to the subway station in Toronto (and other cities) and then spare themselves the traffic and gas cost of sitting on the highway for 2 hours. And this is the ONLY solution for a big city, since most can't afford to live by the jobs/colleges (even suburban single-bathroom costs are over a million 40 mins out from downtown). EDIT: I can see residents downtown paying the most taxes being against it though - all it does for them in personal terms is erode their power. Makes their real estate cheaper (removes exclusivity of quick access to offices / educational facilities) and makes the downtown areas accessible to people who can't live there.
- thebean11 4y ago
  The housing away from the city still needs to be pretty dense, otherwise you're building a ton of infrastructure to transport few people (or people need to drive / take the bus to the train station which isn't the end of the world). > I can see residents downtown paying the most taxes being against it though - all it does for them in personal terms is erode their power. It could also help subsidize their taxes to some extent since commuters are occupying offices and spending money in the city without occupying housing. Depends how things are set up. I don't think the people living in Manhattan resent people commuting from Jersey or Queens for work.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
It sounds incredibly naive to imagine that stopping enforcement of breaking and entering will suddenly give everyone a place to stay. It might work for a few minutes or a few weeks, but I guarantee that the freeloaders won't fix the window or door jamb that they break. Why should they? They have no pride of ownership. I spent some time in the Soviet Union before the wall fell. It sucked. Idealistic ideas like this destroy housing for everyone.

kapuasuite 4y ago

The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living. There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.

southerntofu 4y ago
> those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live Good point, although i would like data to back that claim. For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone: this does not account for vacant industrial/office space which could also be converted to housing. In all cases, *proposing* (without coercion) homeless people a house somewhere does not sound inhumane at all. > there are far more people living in overcrowded housing Good point, too. Although as i said i would like to see data suggesting that the current real estate market (accounting for all vacant units) can't house everyone decently. > There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners. To be clear, i'm not saying we should stop building houses entirely. But as long as you allow housing to remain vacant, prices are driven by speculation not by actual supply. I believe we should both rehouse homeless people immediately and keep investing in eco-friendly collective, affordable housing.
- gruez 4y ago
  >For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone Source? A quick search only turns a figure half of that: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-paris-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290578/number-homes-par... Also, just because it's "vacant" doesn't mean it can actually be used to house homeless people. It could be undergoing renovations, or on the rental market.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    10% doesn't seem entirely reasonable. Maybe bit high, but still if the vacancy is because renovation, waiting for new tenants either renters or owners. You want some slack in any market. And ofc, there is some number of second or third properties in cities like Paris. Maybe part of solution would be to ban these and AirBnB entirely. Only allow hotels and like to exist.
carapace 4y ago
Anecdote: I live in Park Merced: > Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississippi River after Park La Brea in Los Angeles. It was a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments in southwestern San Francisco for middle-income tenants. It contains 3,221 residences (after sale of five blocks to San Francisco State University (SFSU)) and over 9,000 residents, and is one of four remaining privately owned large-scale garden apartment complexes in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Merced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Merced On my block, just on my street, there are over a dozen empty garden apartments, 2- and 3-bedrooms, that have been empty since (more-or-less) the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. Folks started leaving and no one has moved back in. Next to my house there are three empty apt.'s to the left, one to the right, and four across the street. The owners haven't lowered rents though. The theory is that they would rather keep the rents high and the apartments empty than lower the rents because if they do that it affects their ability to raise rents later on (rent control is the only way I afford to still live here. For better or worse my family pays less than half the market rate. However, as I am describing, the market rate is not "clearing the demand" or whatever the economic jargon would be. No one is renting at "market" rate right now.) The other problem is that rents going down affect the valuation of the property, something like that. IANAEconomist. Anyway... There are literally hundreds of perfectly fine apartments ready to rent here in Park Merced, with the M line light rail going directly to downtown SF in about 20-30 minutes and a BART station in walking distance. - - - - Get this. Some folks moved in to the place across the street on Monday, but then Wednesday the staff was here kicking them out: they were squatters. I spoke to one of the staff who told me that this was a group of people who were breaking in and squatting in units all over the property, that they had changed the locks on the house they tried to squat in, and that he had called the police, who asked if anyone was being violent (no) and then still hadn't shown up an hour later! They never did show up. The squatters moved all their stuff and their two dogs back into their vehicles and left.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Seems like rent controls are the issues. Causing markets to be inefficient. No surprises there. Get rid of them and maybe supply increases as it can better match demand and capability of renters to pay.

throw1234651234 4y ago

"This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France)." I always wonder about public transportation. It never really took off in the US, but it IS way more efficient. If we had very fast subways / trains, we could theoretically stretch housing way out away from the city. Then there is more equal opportunity for jobs / attending universities without living on campus. I know this is a bit off topic, but it always seems to me like having QUALITY public transportation is efficient, but I can't quite defend it. Not even to the exclusion of cars. For example I know a lot of workers who drive their car to the subway station in Toronto (and other cities) and then spare themselves the traffic and gas cost of sitting on the highway for 2 hours. And this is the ONLY solution for a big city, since most can't afford to live by the jobs/colleges (even suburban single-bathroom costs are over a million 40 mins out from downtown). EDIT: I can see residents downtown paying the most taxes being against it though - all it does for them in personal terms is erode their power. Makes their real estate cheaper (removes exclusivity of quick access to offices / educational facilities) and makes the downtown areas accessible to people who can't live there.

thebean11 4y ago
The housing away from the city still needs to be pretty dense, otherwise you're building a ton of infrastructure to transport few people (or people need to drive / take the bus to the train station which isn't the end of the world). > I can see residents downtown paying the most taxes being against it though - all it does for them in personal terms is erode their power. It could also help subsidize their taxes to some extent since commuters are occupying offices and spending money in the city without occupying housing. Depends how things are set up. I don't think the people living in Manhattan resent people commuting from Jersey or Queens for work.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

It sounds incredibly naive to imagine that stopping enforcement of breaking and entering will suddenly give everyone a place to stay. It might work for a few minutes or a few weeks, but I guarantee that the freeloaders won't fix the window or door jamb that they break. Why should they? They have no pride of ownership. I spent some time in the Soviet Union before the wall fell. It sucked. Idealistic ideas like this destroy housing for everyone.