4 ms·

there are 16 million empty homes in the us. start there. Someone owns them, raise the taxes on them until someone lives in them.

oneoff786 4y ago
Are they near jobs
- coding123 4y ago
  at least 54k of them are in the bay area
  - jpatt 4y ago
    Because nothing in life is allowed to be simple, "vacant" in this context can actually mean a lot of things. Here's a break down of the 2020 figure of 34k +/- 1.6k: > - 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers. > - 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident. > - 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year. (The Mercury-News references these but classifies them separately from vacant homes, whereas the census considers these vacancies in themselves.) > - Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant.” "Other vacant." Is a hodge-podge of condemned units, units in foreclosure, units in renovation or seismic retrofitting, a plethora of other corner cases and odds and ends, and homes actually just sitting empty doing not much. (source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacant-homes-census-five-year-2020 https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacan...)
    - coding123 4y ago
      It just seems crazy to me that we have a home for every homeless person but because of book keeping we can't do it. We seem to have an excuse for everything.
khuey 4y ago
An empty home in rural Iowa is not a substitute for a home in a thriving urban area.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  This rebuttal would be easier to accept if it was paired with a population & vacancy density map to back it up. There surely exist rural vacancies, but am I to understand that you believe most vacancies are rural?
  - khuey 4y ago
    The states with the highest vacancy rates are pretty rural (and Florida, which likely has lots of vacation homes). https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-study/ https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Thank you. My search yielded similar results[1]. I'm a bit stuck on exactly how to parse this. Vacancy rates, while a fine metric for answering some questions, don't seem to be well suited to this one. Vacancies per capita might be more along the lines of what I'm interested in. 1. https://landgeist.com/2021/08/03/vacancy-rate-in-the-us/ https://landgeist.com/2021/08/03/vacancy-rate-in-the-us/
welshwelsh 4y ago
Many of those houses are simply between owners, in need of repairs, in abandoned towns nobody wants to live in etc I'd prefer if we focus on simply increasing the supply. Ban single family house zoning. Encourage more high density apartment buildings. Build more cities.

oneoff786 4y ago

Are they near jobs

coding123 4y ago
at least 54k of them are in the bay area
- jpatt 4y ago
  Because nothing in life is allowed to be simple, "vacant" in this context can actually mean a lot of things. Here's a break down of the 2020 figure of 34k +/- 1.6k: > - 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers. > - 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident. > - 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year. (The Mercury-News references these but classifies them separately from vacant homes, whereas the census considers these vacancies in themselves.) > - Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant.” "Other vacant." Is a hodge-podge of condemned units, units in foreclosure, units in renovation or seismic retrofitting, a plethora of other corner cases and odds and ends, and homes actually just sitting empty doing not much. (source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacant-homes-census-five-year-2020 https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacan...)
  - coding123 4y ago
    It just seems crazy to me that we have a home for every homeless person but because of book keeping we can't do it. We seem to have an excuse for everything.

khuey 4y ago

An empty home in rural Iowa is not a substitute for a home in a thriving urban area.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
This rebuttal would be easier to accept if it was paired with a population & vacancy density map to back it up. There surely exist rural vacancies, but am I to understand that you believe most vacancies are rural?
- khuey 4y ago
  The states with the highest vacancy rates are pretty rural (and Florida, which likely has lots of vacation homes). https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-study/ https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Thank you. My search yielded similar results[1]. I'm a bit stuck on exactly how to parse this. Vacancy rates, while a fine metric for answering some questions, don't seem to be well suited to this one. Vacancies per capita might be more along the lines of what I'm interested in. 1. https://landgeist.com/2021/08/03/vacancy-rate-in-the-us/ https://landgeist.com/2021/08/03/vacancy-rate-in-the-us/

welshwelsh 4y ago

Many of those houses are simply between owners, in need of repairs, in abandoned towns nobody wants to live in etc I'd prefer if we focus on simply increasing the supply. Ban single family house zoning. Encourage more high density apartment buildings. Build more cities.