Friendly reminder when talking about housing that: 1) in 2022, there were 16M homes just lying empty. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2022/03/07/

Friendly reminder when talking about housing that: 1) in 2022, there were 16M homes just lying empty. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2022/03/07/16-million-homes-lie-empty-and-these-states-are-the-vacancy-hot-spots/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2022/03/07/16-... 2) Around 5% of Americans own at least a second home (https://www.statista.com/statistics/228894/people-living-in-households-that-own-a-second-home-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/228894/people-living-in-...) and given a US population of about 340M and, given the very kind presumption that: people *only* own a second home and every group that owns a second home has 2 people in it, that'd be 340M * 2.5% = 8.5M second homes. 3) "Investor Homes", which according to ( https://todayshomeowner.com/blog/guides/are-big-companies-buying-up-single-family-homes/ https://todayshomeowner.com/blog/guides/are-big-companies-bu... ) tend to be the small houses that people want to buy account for about 22% of purchases *per year*; and they probably aren't selling them, so year over year that takes quite a few properties off the market. We have *a lot* of spare homes if we incentivized real humans that will live in those properties themselves buying properties and more importantly disincentivized or even punished people and companies from owning second, third or more houses. Yes, many of those houses might be in undesirable places; but among 16M "just lying empty" and 8.5M "second homes", we could probably take a *huge* bite out of "4.5M" homes. edit: I've edited the text twice now and I can't seem to get italics working, blah.