No that's actually a large part of housing problems. Like a third of Manhattan real estate is empty. And Manhattan is already super dense but still has homeless people.
I live in Manhattan and the idea that a full third of the real estate here is empty is laughable. Have you ever visited??
As my sibling comment points out, the real rate (as determined by actual data) is less than 5%.
"about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant for more than 10 months a year" [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-...
Even your source shows it... that's 30 percent of a small (presumably affluent) section of the city, not of the whole city. There are some 2.5 million apartments in the city, and this is talking about just 5k.
There are other sources that cite the actual percentage as 11% [1]. That's still high, unfair to residents, and worth discussing, but you can't win arguments by putting up fake stats.
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-si...
The article itself says > Among all of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan, 102,000 were identified as vacant in the 2005-9 American Community Survey.
The numbers are a bit muddied, because the article hints but doesn't ivestigate the seasonal bias in vacancy:
> Of those, about 33,000 — or about 1 in every 25 Manhattan homes — had an owner or renter who lived there less than two months of the year.
[0] https://www.nakedapartments.com/blog/nyc-vacancy-rate/ [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/18HSR.pd...