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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Though you messed up the basic numbers, I think that the larger point needs addressing.

Why are these homes vacant? Should people be allowed to take a month of vacation without losing their home? Is it ok for an apartment or house to be empty for a few months in between residents?

One month in between tenants every two years is more than a 4% vacancy rate. What should the vacancy rate be?

And what if in addition to housing the homeless we also want to house workers with unreasonable commutes?

Every single person I know who has raise this X vacant homes and <X homeless has not bothered to ask these very basic questions.

We need more homes. 25% more than we currently have, in the high demand areas. We don't need hem in Detroit or Stockton, we need them next to jobs. And we need to stop the profiteering home owners who speculate on the value of their homes by blocking others from living close to them.

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Obviously there will be some time between renters where units will sit vacant, but that's not the issue. Units are vacant because landlords don't want to rent them out for various reasons. Totally different situation! So, during this housing crunch units sit vacant and very little supply is being added. Sure, owning property means they're allowed to do whatever they want with it (within reason), but we're also free to complaint about the situation.

As to why landlords leave units empty; rent control. Rent control and strong renters protections, combined with dramatically increasing market rate, means landlords will get more money if they keep a unit empty for a year.

> Units are vacant because landlords don't want to rent them out for various reasons. Totally different situation!

Are they? I don't see much of the Bay Area but I haven't notice many vacancies at all, and the rates overall are low from what I've seen, something like 5%.

I'm all for vacancy taxes, and actively looking to see how to get one passed in my city. But I don't think it's going to do much other than provide a revenue stream for homeless services, like Oakland's Measure W. I can't see them helping with the housing situation based on these sorts of low vacancy rates. We need 25% more housing than we currently have, and a 0% vacancy rate is pretty much impossible and a horrible situation for renters, so I would hate to see the vacancy rate go any lower.

> We don't need hem in Detroit or Stockton, we need them next to jobs.

If more companies embraced remote workers or even just partial remote work, this problem would be greatly alleviated.

On the other hand we could also let people live where they want, instead of letting a few people exclude others from living by them.

People want to live in the Bay Area, it's wrong to exclude them.

Look, even if by some miracle, building permits are easier to get and more lenient; there’s a reason for “excluding people” and it’s not gatekeeping surplus housing. Supply is just limited. It will always be too limited due to geography and other conditions. Ie the thing stopping people from living where they want is that there’s not enough places available to everyone. Regardless of the economic system used to distribute this finite resource (money, lotteries, etc...), no matter what the end result will be the same: not everyone will get housing.

While there are a lot of nice things here, people mainly want to be here because of the jobs. If you help distribute the jobs via remoting, it will really help in reducing demand for very limited resources

There's more than enough space, there's tons of space that we need to make more dense with infill housing.

This isn't just a social issue, it's also a climate issue. Even if we assume extremely ambitious goals of 100% EVs and 75% of energy from renewables in 2050, we need to drastically reduce the amount of vehicle miles traveled in California, which means denser housing with mixed uses.

Right now that sort of necessary housing and business is illegal in most of the peninsula. We need to change that.

It really is just gate-keeping to keep others out.

Distributing jobs is not a solution, because sprawl is not a solution. We must make better use of existing land, rather than consuming more farmland or nature.

I agree with improving inventory with dense housing. However, where I disagree is that it can meet availability for everyone who wants to live here both now AND in the future. Sure, we might be able to generate enough space in the near future assuming the NIMBYS start losing legal fights, but demand will almost always outstrip inventory unless your population and economy start shrinking.

Remote work is still a good tool because it requires no extra upfront costs or slow to pass legislation; it can be done right now to offset demand of a scarce finite resource: living space. Moreover, it doesn't have to eat up new land. I would imagine it could help revitalize urban centers such as Detroit and other cities in the Rust Belt

> but demand will almost always outstrip inventory unless your population and economy start shrinking.

I don't know why this has to be the case. Can you expand upon the reasoning that makes you think this?

Populations keep growing and they are attracted by the jobs centralized in specific locations. Unfortunately, physical space both horizontal and vertical are limited. This isn’t some new revelation and it isn’t limited to just the US, nor is it some new phenomenon; it’s well known history. It’s a very old problem. The only thing new is remote work as an option

But we are not limited by space in the Bay Area.

Here's a couple different models of what building adequate housing would look like:

https://medium.com/@firstcultural/how-california-can-build-3...

I'm not really seeing this in the article unless I missed it. The plan calls for 3.5 million new homes. The problem is that the Bay Area alone will probably need approximately 2 million more homes in the coming decades. That doesn't include LA and other regions.

Also, it's not just physical space that's a resource limit: there's also time (how fast can you build it?) and money (do builders have enough financing). This is with the optimistic assumption that NIMBY legislation doesn't get in the way, which is why I still feel that remote work is still the most ideal solution, since the only roadblock it has is company culture.

I guess another solution is the route Palo Alto is taking: hinder or destroy the local economy to limit demand of physical space. I don't agree with this since only wealthy people can afford to deal with it.

Sure, people want to live here, but why is it wrong to allow people some self-determination and allow them to decide who and how can build stuff, even if they are dumb and/or claim/want contradictory things?

It's one thing to allow some of "self" determination, which would probably be a good thing if it was done. However, that's not what the current process is, it's most definitely note self determination. It's set up to allow a tiny number of people to say "no" to things. It doesn't poll the public to determine what to do. This one-sided input process has predictable results, with massive damage to the general interests of people who live in an area.

Aren't there more people who are able to vote and rent in SF/LA/BayArea, than who have property there?

To me it seems the problem is that the braindead NIMBYs successfully co-opted the locals with property, thanks to the property tax boogeyman.

LA and Boston did this and now just have vacant high-rises to show for it. And, really, greedy homeowners are the least of our worries compared to real-estate developers and landlords.

I've seen the idea of a vacancy tax thrown around. Not sure how effective it would be, but might be worth trying.

For a city of 4 million people, LA is building something like 9 thousand apartments [1]. That's not a 25% increase in the number of homes, that's nothing at all. It doesn't cover the number of births, the number of immigrants. Building that few homes is a plan to displaced people from the city.

It's time to stop treating housing as if numbers don't matter, and the only thing that matters is our feelings about seeing a crane.

There is a massive housing shortage, and people that deny it are just as fact-free as climate deniers.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/d0a9wb/top_2...

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