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Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

Why build more? There's plenty of abandoned/empty housing everywhere in big cities? Unfortunately i don't speak german so i can't give you stats about Berlin, but in Paris alone it's >200 000 empty housing units according to official statistics.

Building more is definitely the wrong solution to housing. Just remove the capitalist vampire landlords making a profit on basic human needs, and let everybody enjoy free housing for life!

EDIT: Corrected stat.

EDIT2: Funny to see people downvoting without argument. Are you all against Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services" ?

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How is it that rents are so high and yet there are empty housing units? Don’t landlords want the money?

They might think it's more profitable to wait so that they can sell or rent the unit later at a higher price.

Why collect rent when the property price keeps increasing regardless? Saves you from having to deal with the tenants and saves you tons of worries/busywork like:

- How tedious will it be to find suitable tenants (do you want to go through 1000 emails)?

- Will they make a mess of the place?

- Will they call you at random times to complain about neighbors?

- Will you have to organize and deal with mechanics when e.g. the heating breaks?

And so on. If property prices go up x% per year, buying housing is a great investment even if you leave it empty. And yes, this is a serious problem in larger cities, where investors (domestic or even foreign) just buy up housing without any intention to let people live there, exacerbating the problem.

To be clear, I am just a tenant, but the above incentives for investors are straightforward to see.

> Why collect rent when the property price keeps increasing regardless?

Because then you get the property price gains and the rental income on top!

I don’t doubt this is happening, I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.

As an individual person with a heart, it's hard to wrap one's head around. But the problem is landowners are usually very rich and soulless, when not actual corporations who have nothing human at all. To them, an empty apartment is just a line in a spreadsheet that will bring them money sooner or later. Renting the apartments would be more trouble for them, despite bringing in a little more money.

Seems like a market opportunity. Take on the rental risk and management costs for some fraction of the rent payments. Insurance can be used to hedge against damages.

Many companies are doing that already, and it's not working as a strategy for housing people (despite making some people very rich). The problem is that housing is a market to begin with. Basic commodities like housing shouldn't be subject to speculation and other capitalist nonsense.

> How is it that rents are so high and yet there are empty housing units?

Rents are so high BECAUSE there are empty housing units. If all available housing units went on the market, rent prices would collapse along with the real-estate speculative bubble, which is precisely what landlords are trying to avoid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

People can't live without housing so demand is not elastic. Plus the housing market is special regarding spatial location. Applying regular market rules as if the housing market behaved the same as, say, the screwdrivers market, does not make sense at all.

In 99% cases it's the government/zoning rules that prevent increasing the supply of housing not private investors not wanting to build enough.

And in many cases it's private investors buying houses for speculation (either by increasing rent or by using them for AirBnBs) the ones that drive prices up, not an increase of supply.

In any case, my point is that applying market rules to housing does not make sense, it's not a competitive market at all and never can be.

That's just pro-landlord propaganda but i've never seen actual evidence of that. I have seen evidence though that landlords and public powers conspire against the population to gentrify neighborhoods and drive prices up, leaving tons of apartments empty so they can make more money speculating.

Absolutely not. Investors fight with tooth and nails to keep the prices up because it's more profitable than building.

It is more nuanced; the private investors want to make profit as quick as possible, they do not care about long term development of the area (many politicians either, they might not be in their position after next election).

The private investors won't do infrastructure either - it is expensive - so they want to build where the infrastructure is already in place. So that's why we see trying to increase density.

So the zoning rules are there as a conterweight to this.

Just curious, would you happen to have a reference for Paris handy?

You can find an article on paris.fr website claiming 17% empty housing in Paris (and rising) in 2019 : https://www.paris.fr/pages/le-saviez-vous-17-des-logements-p...

So my bad for giving a wrong number the >1 million is in fact 3 millions for the whole of France (~8%). For Paris it's "only" ~240000 (according to 2019 paris.fr numbers) which is on the scale of one empty apartment in the heart of Paris for every mishoused person ("sans domicile fixe") in the whole of France, according to official statistics (which may be too optimistic on the number of mishoused people).

https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3572856

According to INSEE (official statistics), between 1990 and 2015, population has grown 0.4%, housing units have grown 1%, while abandoned housing units grew 2.8%. Now may be a good time to say that secondary housing (vacation houses for the privileged elite that can afford it) is NOT abandoned housing according to these stats.

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