5 ms·

There are 28 vacant homes for every person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.

25 points by alex_young 3y ago

hqsolomo 3y ago
I grew up in Detroit and saw this first-hand. It's even worse when you consider the number of people just barely treading water. I think a huge part of the problem is that as a society we're okay with this. It makes me sad when I think about it- I'm smart enough to acknowledge the problem but too ignorant/stupid/afraid to be a part of the solution.
- sneak 3y ago
  Most of the completely vacant homes in Detroit that were there when we were growing up have since been bulldozed or renovated and inhabited in the last ten years. Like 75-90% of them are gone now, either as $600-700/mo rentals, or empty lots (many of which people are now farming).
  - hqsolomo 3y ago
    Tell me about it: I'm a grown man and legit broke down into a sobbing fit after visiting the house I grew up in a few years ago and it was pretty much gone. Roof gone, siding gone, even the fir tree in front of the house is gone. I may not have had a stellar childhood but... That was my home for most of my life, you know? We knew it likely wouldn't last since we couldn't afford to take care of the house the way it needed when we lived there but that doesn't make it hurt any less. The only house still left on my block in Brightmoor is my neighbor's house and his house looks like it's falling down, too. He's still living in it as well because all of us were just barely making it. I wish I made FAANG money. After taking care of my own debts I wanted to buy our build as many houses for my block as I could and then just let people stay in them no matter how much it costed me ("a fool and his gold are easily separated" and whatnot). I know it's stupid but the one thing I always wanted growing up was just for someone- anyone- to come in and say "we can't treat people like this" and help without considering the business value of helping. So many people spend so much time thinking about how to help (rightfully so) that nobody ACTUALLY ends up helping.
- Lendal 3y ago
  Thank you for writing the only comment here that expresses any amount of compassion. I believe this is the true root of the homelessness problem in the US. American society values compassion at just about zero.
  - hqsolomo 3y ago
    To be fair, most people don't have to deal with this and they shouldn't have to. I have compassion because I've personal experience with it. I'm an outlier here. Still, I do think the US (and the world) should really put the "Golden Rule" as a top priority. So many problems would be non-issues if we did!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thefounder 3y ago
Imagine how many "vacant" cars exist for every person who can't afford a car. There is guy "Jay Leno" who hoarded a lot of cars. Someone should transfer them to people without cars. Simple solutions for simple issues.
orwin 3y ago
I don't know about the US, but in my country the issue is home near a job. Or rather, near a place that propose a lot of jobs than can make you enough money to live well enough.
akira2501 3y ago
Are they "experiencing" homelessness or are they "experiencing" unchecked mental health issues and addiction? Perhaps, counting homes isn't useful here.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Are they “experiencing” homelessness Yes. > or are they “experiencing” unchecked mental health issues and addiction? Some are also experiencing that, as are some people who are not homeless. Yes, those problems reinforce each other, and not dealing with either makes the other more difficult to deal with where they co-occur. Behavioral health support is for a large segment of the affected population an important part of dealing with homeless, and housing is an important component of dealing with a significant set of behavioral health issues. They aren’t mutually exclusive problems, nor is addressing one exclusive of addressing the other.
  - thegrim33 3y ago
    I've lived in multiple places in downtown Seattle for the last ~15 years and I can count on one hand the number of homeless people I've seen during that time that aren't either completely drugged out or without serious mental health issues. It's, in my first-hand experience, the overwhelmingly top deciding factor in their situation. Homeless advocates like to paint this pretty (propaganda) picture of people that, shucks, are just down on their luck, shucks, their rent went up and now they're homeless and if only we gave them (steal from others) some money or a house or whatever, that'll be the help they need to get back on their feet. The vast, vast, majority of the current homeless population will just destroy the house and then move on whenever they're eventually kicked out.
    - crooked-v 3y ago
      > homeless people I've seen There's the confirmation bias right there. You aren't "seeing" the people who are homeless but don't have other issues going on, because they can take more care of themselves and so look "normal".
  - 3y ago
boeingUH60 3y ago
> While cities like Syracuse and Detroit have a staggering number of vacant housing units per unhoused person, the largest populations experiencing homelessness are in the American West. > Both Los Angeles and San Jose, California, have two of the largest populations experiencing homelessness in the country, including many unhoused people between the ages of 18 and 24. Demand and supply. Many vacant homes in places people don’t want to live I guess..
jimmychoozyx 3y ago
In the reality of the world for virtually all animals, if you don't/can't find food & prepare it to eat (also known as "work"), you don't eat. I've lived in a tent long term while studying a skillset, and now, a few years after breaking into good paying work, I almost have enough money to purchase a tolerable enough piece of property and build a cabin on it. Having lived on communes, including one where even felons were allowed, know now that I would perhaps offer free or low cost tiny houses to people, but only if I knew they were working towards something positive. ... I'd like to know how many out of the 28 are expending effort towards earn a house or rental in some way, such as working, studying, or building skills. pro-social stuff. And how many are doing the opposite: drugs, crime, etc. anti-social stuff. Because although houses exist, they require effort to keep: taxes, maintenance, etc. If a person isn't willing to expend effort, how can it be justified to give them a regular ol' house? Perhaps a tiny house as part of a government or NGO-funded social safety net program.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  how many animals steal and murder ( their prey or even offspring) for food? if they were human would that be ethical?
andsoitis 3y ago
> Over 580,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness That is a rate of ~0.18%, if my calculations are correct (600k / 332m). Contrast to Sweden (population 10m) which had an estimated 33,000 homeless people in 2020, yielding a rate of 0.33%. [1] Contrast to Japan, which has an estimated effective homelessness rate of 0%. So Sweden has a worse homelessness rate than the US but we all suck compared to Japan! 1. https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20statistics&text=Housing%20prices%20having%20increased%20homelessness,33%2C000%20(Stadsmissionen%2C%202021) https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20st....
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  Japan is weird in that they build cheap homes they expect to tear down and replace every decade and the ones they don't tear down they sell for the price of a car in the USA. There's just way too much supply with IMHO isn't a bad thing because I don't think real estate should be an investment, unless we can make it more fair like it was decades ago.
6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
I'd love to know how this number changes for different vacancy durations. I'm really curious how many of these are in the process of being sold or rented out or similar and won't be vacant in a month.
Analemma_ 3y ago
This is such a disingenuous bit of info just juuuust skirts the boundary of outright lying. Sure, there are a bunch of "empty houses" in Detroit: which have the wiring ripped out of the walls, no functional plumbing, and probably need $50-100,000 of work before they're fit for habitation. Does that mean we should round up all the homeless people in the Bay Area, ship them to Detroit, and put them in decrepit shacks? Nonsense. Flag this article; it's a cheap trick to distract from the necessity of upzoning and permitting reform to get more houses built where people actually need them.
- jeron 3y ago
  > Does that mean we should round up all the homeless people in the Bay Area, ship them to Detroit, and put them in decrepit shacks? This could be an interesting idea with a program that incorporates sweat equity and provides assistance to rebuild these homes
  - tptacek 3y ago
    People have thought about things like this. There's lots of hard problems, among them the reason these houses are vacant to begin with: there isn't a local economy that supports them, let alone the huge social services fabric that'd be required to get unhoused people in a position both to rehab houses(!) and then thrive in Detroit metro. Here it's worth remembering, just as a single data point, that most unhoused people in California are Californians. They didn't migrate to California to be homeless in the sun. You can't generally move them around the board like chess pieces.
  - housemusicfan 3y ago
    Do you think the guy wearing his underwear outside his pants and muttering to himself is a candidate for "sweat equity"?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Yeah. It looks like you can roughly break vacant homes into thirds: * Vacation homes (ie, in places with only seasonal demand for housing) * Abandoned homes (due either to death & title issues, or condemnation) * Temporarily, transactionally vacant homes (currently up for sale, currently up for rent, or recently rented/sold and not yet occupied)
crooked-v 3y ago
There are plenty of vacant homes in the middle of nowhere where there aren't any jobs. Exclude those and the numbers go way down.
- thefounder 3y ago
  For some reasons people prefer to be homeless in an expensive city rather than trying to move to a cheap place and get a "cheap" job there.
  - thegrim33 3y ago
    Because the expensive city has more social services that will just provide for them rather than them having to work a job and provide for themselves.
    - miguelazo 3y ago
      No, it's because that's the area they're already familiar with. https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/califor...
Jemaclus 3y ago
This isn't really a great metric. The majority of vacant homes have been vacant for less than a year, which typically means the vacant homes are either being renovated, newly constructed and have yet to be sold, or seeking rent. Some decent percentage of those are also not livable -- they're condemned, they aren't up to code, they're flooded or damaged in some way. These homes count towards vacancy rates, but they aren't livable and you can't just throw homeless people into them. This comes up fairly often, but it's also frequently debunked as a viable metric for tackling the homelessness problem. Yes, we need more places for homeless people to live. Vacant homes are typically not going to satisfy that particular requirement. It _is_ an interesting metric with respect to population and the increasing rate of homelessness, but it's not particularly interesting with respect to solutions, imo.
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  > which typically means the vacant homes are either being renovated, newly constructed and have yet to be sold, or seeking rent. Some decent percentage of those are also not livable -- they're condemned, they aren't up to code, they're flooded or damaged in some way Is there any data on these categories?
  - Jemaclus 3y ago
    Yes, absolutely. The US Census has a report on vacancy rates here: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf Table 3 has a section called "Vacant - Held Off Market" which shows the number that are held off market for whatever reason. It's a relatively small number, but it does comprise tens if not hundreds of thousands of units across the country. Here's another report from Berkeley that has some graphs that describe "rented or sold but not yet occupied" rates, as well, which would be emblematic of the renovations and such. https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CR_Final_2.3.19.pdf https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02...
    - miguelazo 3y ago
      I would be very skeptical of how comprehensive that data is. Are they counting the empty "bank account" condos that have flooded every major metro downtown as vacant? Doubtful, because they're not on the market even though no one lives there. No is reporting that data-- in fact, there have been efforts to kill such proposals.
legitster 3y ago
This report is kind of implying a fantasy where we can just start moving people into vacant houses, even though it's clearly aware it's not a good idea: > Vacant homes and buildings often succumb to the elements and deteriorate due to leaks, damage and general lack of maintenance before ever finding a buyer willing to pay their inflated prices. An abundance of vacant homes on the market are also attributed to rising rent and home prices. Part of the issue is that nearly every federal or government program for low-income or first time home-ownership has stringent requirements on the livability of the home. An FHA loan cannot be used towards property repair. Which makes sense - the government doesn't want people moving into unsafe hovels. So that means there is not really a legal mechanism to get low income families into vacant real estate. So the only people who can realistically take over the vacancies are cash-rich buyers. While it's easy to shake your fist at the sky and yell "capitalism!" I am sure banks would love to write off their foreclosed properties in Detroit. But it's probably pretty clear that homeless people would rather not and the city would rather not.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  How many less rentals are there now than there were before Airbnb? how many are foreign investor owned? Personally I think you should not be allowed to own a property without citizenship and without a primary residence within 1k mile radius. Also businesses should not be allowed to own residential unless they're a bank and it's a foreclosure. How many investors set up shell accounts just for real estate investments?
  - miguelazo 3y ago
    This is a HUGE factor and deliberately obscured by real estate interests and their YIMBY allies.
    - legitster 3y ago
      > real estate interests and their YIMBY allies. What? Real estate interests are notoriously and by their nature NIMBY. Almost all opposition to upzoning comes from homeowner groups to protect property values.
miguelazo 3y ago
Not surprising even if the numbers are a bit off. Almost none of the new housing stock being built is affordable (thanks, YIMBYs!). It all comes down to affordability, as seen in the recent major study discussed on Ezra Klein's July 18th podcast: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/what-we-learned-from-the-ONPET39VF1L/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/wha...
miguelazo 3y ago
"Designed to be representative of all adults 18 years and older experiencing homelessness in California, CASPEH includes nearly 3,200 administered questionnaires and 365 in-depth interviews with adults experiencing homelessness in eight regions of the state, representing urban, rural, and suburban areas. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish, with interpreters for other languages. In partnership with a wide array of community stakeholders, the UCSF BHHI team collected data between October 2021 and November 2022. CASPEH was funded by UCSF BHHI, the California Health Care Foundation, and Blue Shield of California Foundation." https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/califor...

25 points by alex_young 3y ago

I grew up in Detroit and saw this first-hand. It's even worse when you consider the number of people just barely treading water. I think a huge part of the problem is that as a society we're okay with this. It makes me sad when I think about it- I'm smart enough to acknowledge the problem but too ignorant/stupid/afraid to be a part of the solution.

sneak 3y ago
Most of the completely vacant homes in Detroit that were there when we were growing up have since been bulldozed or renovated and inhabited in the last ten years. Like 75-90% of them are gone now, either as $600-700/mo rentals, or empty lots (many of which people are now farming).
- hqsolomo 3y ago
  Tell me about it: I'm a grown man and legit broke down into a sobbing fit after visiting the house I grew up in a few years ago and it was pretty much gone. Roof gone, siding gone, even the fir tree in front of the house is gone. I may not have had a stellar childhood but... That was my home for most of my life, you know? We knew it likely wouldn't last since we couldn't afford to take care of the house the way it needed when we lived there but that doesn't make it hurt any less. The only house still left on my block in Brightmoor is my neighbor's house and his house looks like it's falling down, too. He's still living in it as well because all of us were just barely making it. I wish I made FAANG money. After taking care of my own debts I wanted to buy our build as many houses for my block as I could and then just let people stay in them no matter how much it costed me ("a fool and his gold are easily separated" and whatnot). I know it's stupid but the one thing I always wanted growing up was just for someone- anyone- to come in and say "we can't treat people like this" and help without considering the business value of helping. So many people spend so much time thinking about how to help (rightfully so) that nobody ACTUALLY ends up helping.
Lendal 3y ago
Thank you for writing the only comment here that expresses any amount of compassion. I believe this is the true root of the homelessness problem in the US. American society values compassion at just about zero.
- hqsolomo 3y ago
  To be fair, most people don't have to deal with this and they shouldn't have to. I have compassion because I've personal experience with it. I'm an outlier here. Still, I do think the US (and the world) should really put the "Golden Rule" as a top priority. So many problems would be non-issues if we did!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thefounder 3y ago

Imagine how many "vacant" cars exist for every person who can't afford a car. There is guy "Jay Leno" who hoarded a lot of cars. Someone should transfer them to people without cars. Simple solutions for simple issues.

orwin 3y ago

I don't know about the US, but in my country the issue is home near a job. Or rather, near a place that propose a lot of jobs than can make you enough money to live well enough.

akira2501 3y ago

Are they "experiencing" homelessness or are they "experiencing" unchecked mental health issues and addiction? Perhaps, counting homes isn't useful here.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Are they “experiencing” homelessness Yes. > or are they “experiencing” unchecked mental health issues and addiction? Some are also experiencing that, as are some people who are not homeless. Yes, those problems reinforce each other, and not dealing with either makes the other more difficult to deal with where they co-occur. Behavioral health support is for a large segment of the affected population an important part of dealing with homeless, and housing is an important component of dealing with a significant set of behavioral health issues. They aren’t mutually exclusive problems, nor is addressing one exclusive of addressing the other.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  I've lived in multiple places in downtown Seattle for the last ~15 years and I can count on one hand the number of homeless people I've seen during that time that aren't either completely drugged out or without serious mental health issues. It's, in my first-hand experience, the overwhelmingly top deciding factor in their situation. Homeless advocates like to paint this pretty (propaganda) picture of people that, shucks, are just down on their luck, shucks, their rent went up and now they're homeless and if only we gave them (steal from others) some money or a house or whatever, that'll be the help they need to get back on their feet. The vast, vast, majority of the current homeless population will just destroy the house and then move on whenever they're eventually kicked out.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    > homeless people I've seen There's the confirmation bias right there. You aren't "seeing" the people who are homeless but don't have other issues going on, because they can take more care of themselves and so look "normal".
- 3y ago

boeingUH60 3y ago

> While cities like Syracuse and Detroit have a staggering number of vacant housing units per unhoused person, the largest populations experiencing homelessness are in the American West. > Both Los Angeles and San Jose, California, have two of the largest populations experiencing homelessness in the country, including many unhoused people between the ages of 18 and 24. Demand and supply. Many vacant homes in places people don’t want to live I guess..

jimmychoozyx 3y ago

In the reality of the world for virtually all animals, if you don't/can't find food & prepare it to eat (also known as "work"), you don't eat. I've lived in a tent long term while studying a skillset, and now, a few years after breaking into good paying work, I almost have enough money to purchase a tolerable enough piece of property and build a cabin on it. Having lived on communes, including one where even felons were allowed, know now that I would perhaps offer free or low cost tiny houses to people, but only if I knew they were working towards something positive. ... I'd like to know how many out of the 28 are expending effort towards earn a house or rental in some way, such as working, studying, or building skills. pro-social stuff. And how many are doing the opposite: drugs, crime, etc. anti-social stuff. Because although houses exist, they require effort to keep: taxes, maintenance, etc. If a person isn't willing to expend effort, how can it be justified to give them a regular ol' house? Perhaps a tiny house as part of a government or NGO-funded social safety net program.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
how many animals steal and murder ( their prey or even offspring) for food? if they were human would that be ethical?

andsoitis 3y ago

> Over 580,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness That is a rate of ~0.18%, if my calculations are correct (600k / 332m). Contrast to Sweden (population 10m) which had an estimated 33,000 homeless people in 2020, yielding a rate of 0.33%. [1] Contrast to Japan, which has an estimated effective homelessness rate of 0%. So Sweden has a worse homelessness rate than the US but we all suck compared to Japan! 1. https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20statistics&text=Housing%20prices%20having%20increased%20homelessness,33%2C000%20(Stadsmissionen%2C%202021) https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20st....

gremlinsinc 3y ago
Japan is weird in that they build cheap homes they expect to tear down and replace every decade and the ones they don't tear down they sell for the price of a car in the USA. There's just way too much supply with IMHO isn't a bad thing because I don't think real estate should be an investment, unless we can make it more fair like it was decades ago.

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago

I'd love to know how this number changes for different vacancy durations. I'm really curious how many of these are in the process of being sold or rented out or similar and won't be vacant in a month.

Analemma_ 3y ago

This is such a disingenuous bit of info just juuuust skirts the boundary of outright lying. Sure, there are a bunch of "empty houses" in Detroit: which have the wiring ripped out of the walls, no functional plumbing, and probably need $50-100,000 of work before they're fit for habitation. Does that mean we should round up all the homeless people in the Bay Area, ship them to Detroit, and put them in decrepit shacks? Nonsense. Flag this article; it's a cheap trick to distract from the necessity of upzoning and permitting reform to get more houses built where people actually need them.

jeron 3y ago
> Does that mean we should round up all the homeless people in the Bay Area, ship them to Detroit, and put them in decrepit shacks? This could be an interesting idea with a program that incorporates sweat equity and provides assistance to rebuild these homes
- tptacek 3y ago
  People have thought about things like this. There's lots of hard problems, among them the reason these houses are vacant to begin with: there isn't a local economy that supports them, let alone the huge social services fabric that'd be required to get unhoused people in a position both to rehab houses(!) and then thrive in Detroit metro. Here it's worth remembering, just as a single data point, that most unhoused people in California are Californians. They didn't migrate to California to be homeless in the sun. You can't generally move them around the board like chess pieces.
- housemusicfan 3y ago
  Do you think the guy wearing his underwear outside his pants and muttering to himself is a candidate for "sweat equity"?
tptacek 3y ago
Yeah. It looks like you can roughly break vacant homes into thirds: * Vacation homes (ie, in places with only seasonal demand for housing) * Abandoned homes (due either to death & title issues, or condemnation) * Temporarily, transactionally vacant homes (currently up for sale, currently up for rent, or recently rented/sold and not yet occupied)

crooked-v 3y ago

There are plenty of vacant homes in the middle of nowhere where there aren't any jobs. Exclude those and the numbers go way down.

thefounder 3y ago
For some reasons people prefer to be homeless in an expensive city rather than trying to move to a cheap place and get a "cheap" job there.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  Because the expensive city has more social services that will just provide for them rather than them having to work a job and provide for themselves.
  - miguelazo 3y ago
    No, it's because that's the area they're already familiar with. https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/califor...

Jemaclus 3y ago

This isn't really a great metric. The majority of vacant homes have been vacant for less than a year, which typically means the vacant homes are either being renovated, newly constructed and have yet to be sold, or seeking rent. Some decent percentage of those are also not livable -- they're condemned, they aren't up to code, they're flooded or damaged in some way. These homes count towards vacancy rates, but they aren't livable and you can't just throw homeless people into them. This comes up fairly often, but it's also frequently debunked as a viable metric for tackling the homelessness problem. Yes, we need more places for homeless people to live. Vacant homes are typically not going to satisfy that particular requirement. It _is_ an interesting metric with respect to population and the increasing rate of homelessness, but it's not particularly interesting with respect to solutions, imo.

lusus_naturae 3y ago
> which typically means the vacant homes are either being renovated, newly constructed and have yet to be sold, or seeking rent. Some decent percentage of those are also not livable -- they're condemned, they aren't up to code, they're flooded or damaged in some way Is there any data on these categories?
- Jemaclus 3y ago
  Yes, absolutely. The US Census has a report on vacancy rates here: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf Table 3 has a section called "Vacant - Held Off Market" which shows the number that are held off market for whatever reason. It's a relatively small number, but it does comprise tens if not hundreds of thousands of units across the country. Here's another report from Berkeley that has some graphs that describe "rented or sold but not yet occupied" rates, as well, which would be emblematic of the renovations and such. https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CR_Final_2.3.19.pdf https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02...
  - miguelazo 3y ago
    I would be very skeptical of how comprehensive that data is. Are they counting the empty "bank account" condos that have flooded every major metro downtown as vacant? Doubtful, because they're not on the market even though no one lives there. No is reporting that data-- in fact, there have been efforts to kill such proposals.

legitster 3y ago

This report is kind of implying a fantasy where we can just start moving people into vacant houses, even though it's clearly aware it's not a good idea: > Vacant homes and buildings often succumb to the elements and deteriorate due to leaks, damage and general lack of maintenance before ever finding a buyer willing to pay their inflated prices. An abundance of vacant homes on the market are also attributed to rising rent and home prices. Part of the issue is that nearly every federal or government program for low-income or first time home-ownership has stringent requirements on the livability of the home. An FHA loan cannot be used towards property repair. Which makes sense - the government doesn't want people moving into unsafe hovels. So that means there is not really a legal mechanism to get low income families into vacant real estate. So the only people who can realistically take over the vacancies are cash-rich buyers. While it's easy to shake your fist at the sky and yell "capitalism!" I am sure banks would love to write off their foreclosed properties in Detroit. But it's probably pretty clear that homeless people would rather not and the city would rather not.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
How many less rentals are there now than there were before Airbnb? how many are foreign investor owned? Personally I think you should not be allowed to own a property without citizenship and without a primary residence within 1k mile radius. Also businesses should not be allowed to own residential unless they're a bank and it's a foreclosure. How many investors set up shell accounts just for real estate investments?
- miguelazo 3y ago
  This is a HUGE factor and deliberately obscured by real estate interests and their YIMBY allies.
  - legitster 3y ago
    > real estate interests and their YIMBY allies. What? Real estate interests are notoriously and by their nature NIMBY. Almost all opposition to upzoning comes from homeowner groups to protect property values.

miguelazo 3y ago

Not surprising even if the numbers are a bit off. Almost none of the new housing stock being built is affordable (thanks, YIMBYs!). It all comes down to affordability, as seen in the recent major study discussed on Ezra Klein's July 18th podcast: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/what-we-learned-from-the-ONPET39VF1L/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/wha...

miguelazo 3y ago

"Designed to be representative of all adults 18 years and older experiencing homelessness in California, CASPEH includes nearly 3,200 administered questionnaires and 365 in-depth interviews with adults experiencing homelessness in eight regions of the state, representing urban, rural, and suburban areas. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish, with interpreters for other languages. In partnership with a wide array of community stakeholders, the UCSF BHHI team collected data between October 2021 and November 2022. CASPEH was funded by UCSF BHHI, the California Health Care Foundation, and Blue Shield of California Foundation." https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/califor...