Comment by gradys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gradys | Hacker News Reader

> The census’ annual American Communities Survey defines a home as vacant if there is either no occupant or a temporary occupant—temporary meaning “people who will be there for two months or less.”

So this is counting AirBnBs and other short-term rental spaces as vacant.

> Vacancy rates are estimated by in-person visits to properties or by interviews via mail, email, or phone.

I clicked through to the definition from census.gov:

> Mail and computer-assisted telephone and personal-visit interviews. All group quarters responses are obtained by personal visit interview. Most vacant units are not identified until the third month of data collection (the first personal visit). In that month, a 1-in-3 subsample of all addresses for which responses have not been obtained are visited by field representatives.

I'm curious how well you can distinguish permanent residents not being home when field representatives happened to drop by from actually vacant. My house looks like it could be vacant when nobody is home.

More detailed definitions: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf

> Vacant Housing Units. A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report. (See section on "Housing Unit.")

The survey also distinguishes different types of vacancies. See pages 4-6 of the linked document. The overall vacancy number could be misleading without seeing the breakdown.

>So this is counting AirBnBs and other short-term rental spaces as vacant.

by definition tourist or transient, so correctly so. Unless you want to call every room at the hilton an apartment...

That’s a dishonest definition of “vacant” because vacant implies the unit is available for someone to live in.

Obviously you don’t include hotels because those were never intended as housing in the traditional sense.

> Obviously you don’t include hotels because those were never intended as housing in the traditional sense.

Low-end residential hotels (i.e., the ones not catering primarily to extended white-collar business travel) are, in major function, very hard to distinguish from traditional housing. And what stops any other hotel (particularly higher-end residential / extended-stay hotels) from selling into that market is the expectation that doing so (even with units that are otherwise vacant) would sacrifice the opportunity for more rent from richer people, so it very much is a continuous market.

> So this is counting AirBnBs and other short-term rental spaces as vacant.

Exactly. Particularly during a housing crisis, people shouldn't transform apartments into illegal hotels.

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