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5.6M vacant homes and counting: There's a housing crisis brewing in the US
- withinboredom 2y agoInteresting. There was a discussion on reddit yesterday from a realtor commenting on how people were getting loans for >50% of their income again and worried about a crash.
- fooker 2y agoDo you mean yearly income? Houses have been historically between 5-10x of your yearly income. If you could buy a house with less than half of your yearly income, might as well save for a year and buy without a loan.
- science4sail 2y agoI think that they meant the monthly mortgage payments, not the total price of the house.
- halfdan 2y agoThey mean to cover their loan payments they need to pay >50% of their income.
- DataDaemon 2y agoMaybe just reduce price?
- xadhominemx 2y agoMost of these homes are in regions with declining populations and scarce opportunity for employment.
- game_the0ry 2y agoThis would be a good argument for remote work -- let more worker WFH and they can buy those houses in the sticks.
- mlnj 2y agoBut then the expensive city commercial spaces will give the businesses more losses. Can't have that.
- chgs 2y agoGotta keep the Ponzi scheme of the stock market inflated. Without people pouring their earnings into it in the form of 401ks, the record highs can’t be guaranteed - whole thing will collapse.
- xadhominemx 2y agoRemote workers don't want to live in run down rust belt and rural communities
- toomuchtodo 2y agoThere is evidence they want to move where housing is affordable, including parts of the rust belt and rural communities. https://www.yardikube.com/blog/remote-workers-leading-the-migration-across-state-lines/ https://www.yardikube.com/blog/remote-workers-leading-the-mi... https://www.wcnc.com/article/money/charlotte-north-carolina-affordable-housing-remote-workers-relocate-for-cheaper-homes/275-0a5fdd5e-5626-4c3e-a8a4-8af1d37c3fa4 https://www.wcnc.com/article/money/charlotte-north-carolina-... https://www.fanniemae.com/media/48891/display https://www.fanniemae.com/media/48891/display https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-that-remote-work-is-allowing-people-to-move-to-cheaper-rural-areas/ https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-that-remote-w... https://web.archive.org/web/20230127175520/https://www.ruralmn.org/the-state-of-rural-2023/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230127175520/https://www.rural...
- gopher_space 2y ago
- micromacrofoot 2y agono reduce price, only subsidize demand
- imglorp 2y agoWell, public policy is not as hard as physics. At least the homes exist. But you have to make it attractive to fill the homes and deter vacancies.
- olliej 2y agoThe problem is all these properties are in regions that have been in economic decline for decades at this point - sure there's a house, but there may not be jobs, many are extremely remote so even if there are jobs, there may not necessarily be any community (in the literal "no other people" sense not the figurative "there's a great sense of community" sense :D), etc
- piva00 2y agoIt seems to be pretty hard in reality, the theoretical frameworks might be easier to reason about than theoretical physics but the thing about public policy is that materialising it in reality is actually the very hard part of it. Though the part "make it work in reality" has been pretty hard for theoretical physics lately.
- iknowstuff 2y agofriendly reminder that rent control causes vacancies like this. because its better to wait for a better market than let someone sit on your discounted property forever.
- tootie 2y agoIf rent is controlled, then waiting doesn't do anything does it? Also, rent control barely exists anywhere in the country.
- iknowstuff 2y agodepends on the rent control. In most cases you’re allowed to rent at any price you want when changing the tenant.
- throwaway19972 2y ago> friendly reminder that rent control causes vacancies like this This is simply an american myth. I'm not sure where it comes from.
- olliej 2y agoIt's standard property owner propaganda to support price gouging.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe original article's graphic of top-affected metro areas (https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/cities-with-most-vacant-homes-lendingtree-study/ https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/cities-with-most-vacant-..., "Metros with the highest vacancy rates") doesn't look like it has many areas subject to rent control.
- henry2023 2y agoThis is a common epistemological bias in which you try to fit your narrative into what’s observable rather than building a narrative out of what you observe. You can verify yourself that cities with rent control have pretty low vacancy rates for example SF and NY are around 2.5%. And even my claim is not that rent control decreases vacancy. My view is that extremely dense cities with already low vacancies implement rent control as a social measure and usually that doesn’t have a real impact on market dynamics.
- tootie 2y agohttps://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1slOZ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1slOZ Vacancy rates peaked around the subprime crisis and are back down close to norms. 2022 was about the lowest it's been in decades. Vacancy doesn't mean lying fallow, they can be between owners/tenants. There is also likely a huge mismatch between available inventory and location.
- legitster 2y ago> This clearly means that the rental vacancy has increased in the last few years which has led to many homes in the nation's largest metros sitting empty, even though some of them are at very reasonable prices. People moved out of cities. There's less demand, but prices are sticky because you can't risk taking less money than you owe on the unit without defaulting on your loans. There's not really a soft-landing in these markets without some sort of government subsidized refinancing options. But as a nice side effect it would alleviate rent prices in these areas. Still, I don't think people should worry about economic contagion like in 2007. This effect is geographically isolated specifically to key metro areas, is concentrated with institutional real estate investors, and these debts have not been chopped and screwed into as many tranches of CBO packages as previously.
- some_random 2y agoSomething I'm really curious about is what proportion of these vacant houses are in disrepair, if you've done any amount of urban exploring (or watched other people do it) it can be shocking how fast buildings can fall apart in some places. There are entire apartment buildings in Detroit, Gary, etc, with a negative value. The land isn't worth much and the building is in such bad shape the only thing to be done is to demo it and rebuild, which is quite expensive.
- blueelephanttea 2y agoIs this an AI article? It seems to be completely unsourced and has no clear explanation of what it is saying? "the major reason for this Epic housing crisis in some of the" - Why is "epic" capitalized? There is both a housing crunch and massive rental vacancy? No discussion of which metro areas? The article says rates are "historically low"? Like what is going on?
- darkwizard42 2y agoI was going to point this out and surprised you were the only comment bringing it to light. This is a completely unsourced article with one quote from the India Times???
- Valgrim 2y agoI like to refer to this kind of article when a kid has trouble understanding why they need to provide sources in their homework. Sometimes it's difficult for them to understand that this kind of assertation, that people use constantly in a conversational context, just sounds like a poorly formulated opinion when it's written down.
- krferriter 2y agoIs 5.6 million a lot? Where are they located? There are 127 million "households" in the US. And 258 million adults. I know there are unmarried/non-partner adults currently sharing living space who would prefer to acquire their own residence, so that 127 million number wants to go up. Seems like the issue is not enough housing in desirable places. And not enough desirable places, so the demand gets concentrated excessively into the small number of nice, convenient places. Build more trams and subway and regional rail lines. Upzone and pedestrian-orient more areas around transit. People want to live in places like this but they cannot because the few places that do exist like this have such high demand and prices are high.
- ortusdux 2y agoUS Census data https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtabs.html https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtabs.html Table 7 has a good summary of vacancies. I can't imagine where they got the 5.6m number.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoWe have to be honest with ourselves and admit that markets, efficient or inefficient, cannot guarantee an outcome where every consumer can find a matching supplier. Ignoring the fact that there's people who comprise the demand curve to the right of the equilibrium point[1] is delusional. The cost of fooling ourselves with that delusion results in human suffering and ultimately lives. Efficient distribution simply isn't a valid response to dividing people into those who who are the beneficiaries of distribution and those who aren't. "Sorry you can't afford a home, but don't worry, it means someone else could," is unjustifiable. This is literally Economics 101, and understanding the consequences as they relate to housing. 1. Latent demand
- partiallypro 2y agoThere are a lot of vacant homes...largely in places where people don't want to live. We should allow people to build where people want to live via upzoning, etc.