Their link to the report is broken. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Housing/Pages/HousingIndex.as... is more recent and inclusive of the 2014 report.

The title of the original article is malformed. The problem of the empty homes is that they aren't treated as commodities. Commodities are synonymous with low margin and exchangeability with like kind. If homes were seen like normal depreciating commodities, and less like the special snowflake, all legislation must cause them to rise in price gifts to the capital class, they'd be less of a problem.

Thus, homes if actually treated like commodities should exhibit less of the problems the empty homes in this article describes. Artificially cheap/government subsidized credit for home purchase has distorted the housing market, as it has now also done to education. I hope the next bubble they blow up is in healthcare.