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Comment by xvedejas | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, my observation is true about the broader housing market in the Bay Area. Most homes are not homes owned by individuals with multiple homes. And at worst, they're homes on the rental market, and so still help to meet housing demand. Vacant houses are such a small fraction of the housing stock, that even if all of them were full of resident owners, the price problem would still exist.

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The data suggest otherwise: https://www.fastcompany.com/90305242/taxing-empty-apartments...

No, the data does not suggest otherwise. I won't be surprised if Vancouver is very different from San Francisco, which has extremely low vacancy rates.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo...

The subtitle of that article is "But that still leaves more than 100,000 Bay Area homes empty"

So, yes -- it does.

This is a lower rate than elsewhere in the US.

There are fewer than 10,000 homes for sale in the SF Metro area. That means, there are 10x as many homes vacant as are for sale.

If there were 10x as many homes for sale as are currently for sale, what do you think that'd do to the price of homes in the area?

Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/14/the-bay-area-has-more...

To expand further why I think you haven't made a good argument: if high vacancy rates are the problem, and the Bay Area has especially low vacancy rates, why is the Bay Area the least affordable region in the US? High vacancy rates are obviously not the cause of the housing crisis. Maybe you can make the argument that high vacancy rates _coupled with something else_ is the problem, but you don't seem to be making that argument -- and the "something else" is probably the more important factor anyway, since SF doesn't have high vacancy rates.

The bay area has a high concentration of wealth where average salaries are almost twice the rest of the country. Programmers there make $300,000 or more. That's a doctor or lawyer in other areas of the nation.

I don't think high vacancy rates are the problem, I think they are a symptom.

Most of the people in this thread are only looking at the bay area from the past dozen years or so. In 2002, the picture was much different. In 1999, it was the opposite of 2002.

When you've lived in an area for decades, you can pick and choose where and when you buy. If you just moved there for a job, you're stuck without that time diversification and leverage ladder used by the folks who have lived there for a long time and accumulated many properties.

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