You can't take national vacancy rates because housing is extremely local. There's areas of the country with out-migration, lack of jobs, but tons of housing.

You can't take national vacancy rates because housing is extremely local. There's areas of the country with out-migration, lack of jobs, but tons of housing. Post industrial cities in the midwest are like this. There's areas of the country with high paying jobs, but no housing being built. Areas of NY & CA are like this. It is then no surprise that we have 60k homeless in NYC when even people working for banks or tech can barely afford to live there. There's also areas of the country with decent paying jobs, but lots of housing.. with lots of in-migration. Sunbelt is like this. All three of these types of areas have vastly different vacancy rates and homeless rates. Taking national averages confuses the matter. Quick googling points to vacancy rates of: Manhattan 2%, Boston 3%, SF 7%, Detroit (12% owner vacancy / 7% rental vacancy), Miami (3% owner / 7% rental), Austin (1% owner / 6% rental) etc. FRED has some good charts you can see state by state the levels and even shapes are totally different in terms of trends and averages. Expensive northeast- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NJRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NJRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CTRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CTRVAC Midwest https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ILRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ILRVAC Sunbelt https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GARVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GARVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FLRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FLRVAC Northwest https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ORRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ORRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WARVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WARVAC Basically everywhere thats expensive has vacancies around 4% or less while areas that have been building its closer to 8%.. > why do you assume a wealthy family will only buy one house, or could be outbid by a poor family? I was responding to this post that seemed to assume all new housing will be bought by the rich as like extra homes.. People underestimate how much "trickle down" kind of is real in RE. In the absence of nice new construction (which seemingly always gets called "luxury"), people with money will move further and further down the market, to buy & renovate. So the option is build more homes to increase supply, or see the dollars chase existing supply & raise its value (and cost).