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My wife did some work for the Census last year. Our extremely rural neighborhood has lots of unused housing, some for a decade+. That work got her out to see some of the places not visible from the roads, and increased our awareness of the scale of the problem.

At a guess, in our county, 20%+ of the housing is idle, owned by out-of-state companies, some of whom pay property taxes and some dont. The county isn't auctioning off because of tax default anymore, no one was buying these places at $100. Many of these places are complete teardowns now; some actually no longer exist, having burned or apparently been scrapped. The tax assessments on those have not been adjusted, for the few i checked.

I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem.

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> I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem.

I don't think I agree with this assessment. I live in a very rural area two hours northwest of Austin, literally in the middle of nowhere. I've studied the local economy and understand how things work here.

I think the characteristics you've identified in the rural housing supply are not unusual and also not as serious in a practical sense as you seem to be indicating. For example, in San Saba, Texas, 20-30% of the households are under the federal poverty threshold. The median household income in the town of San Saba is about $32K/yr. People just don't have any excess cash so the maintenance on dwellings is neglected. That means folks become extremely thrifty and resourceful patching what needs to be patched, very cheaply, if not for free. Some dwellings simply aren't maintained and one day won't be there anymore.

Families live on small budgets, don't require much and generally just "get by". The municipal and county governments have very small budgets but extremely resourceful staff who accomplish a lot with very little. Everyone comes together as a community when needed (see: February 2021 freeze event) and it all works very efficiently, actually.

To someone who is not from here and who doesn't understand that dynamic, they might see those properties as you described and believe a tragedy was unfolding. But that doesn't reflect reality on the ground vis-a-vis my neighbors.

I'm in rural TN; not that different a place at all. I'm not speaking of family owned homes tho. I'm talking about the Abandoned, uninhabited homes that are now owned by some out of state thing per county records... which is a lot of them. LLC's and INCs whom I believe have the properties valued highly on some book somewhere and haven't done anything to maintain them.

Our local Craigslists always have "Property inspector" jobs listed. You go take some cell phone shots of buildings to prove they exist. The people I have spoken to who have done those say they didn't bother going to the places as often as not and took pics of some neighbors house. Even when people actually do that job and document the true state of these properties I can't help but suspect the information is buried or lost because thats not the narrative management would want.

The actual family owned housing stock got better the last two years, our population doubled for the last 3/4ths of 2020, and all those relatives did a lot of renovation and rebuilding.

I actually used to work with people from East Tennessee for the past 2.5 years. They described how the Knoxville area was growing like crazy with folks from the coastal states moving there.

I understand what you're saying. The ripple effect created by that dynamic would unjustifiably inflate local property values, reducing affordability for locals, creating synthetic demand by reducing supply as the land could otherwise be auctioned.

West TN; we've got that happening too. The neighbor's $750k McMansion has ludicrous "market value" implications for the hunting camp trailers beside it and the doublewide up the road.

and (ahem) East TN is more "western Arlington VA" IMO. I said rural. I'd have to walk a half mile to get a decent rifle shot at a neighbor. It's getting too crowded here.

You just described my road here in Henderson County,TN. We bought 100 acres and built a dream home. In the last years (ish) 4 new single wides went in and a couple of new smaller homes. We were told during the entire build that we will never get out of it what we are putting into it and we don't care. We aren't building for resale, selling it is our kid's problem.

But there are so many abandoned places out here. People have just walked away and never looked back. We had one across the road that over the last 10 years the woods has reclaimed and unless you knew that it was there, you would drive right past it.

Could you use it for hiking, hunting or woods?

My observations passing through rural Texas matches this. You frequently see houses that probably only served 1 maybe 2 generations and then they are in a poor condition uninhabitable by even those folks used to roughing it. Housing stock in rural areas just doesn’t last long.

Finding good carpenters out here who can do structural repairs is effectively impossible.

FWIW I lived in San Diego and saw this too. Houses bought by parents for $50k in 1973 ended up being unmaintainable for some of the families even with Prop 13 keeping their taxes low. Then you'd have houses passes to kids, sometimes with drug problems, but in any case, no resources or knowledge sufficient to maintain a house.

How are the schools funded?

Both local property taxes and property taxes from urban areas that are redistributed to rural communities by the state of Texas.

San Saba ISD is probably the best funded entity in the whole county. Every student has a laptop and home internet. The graduation rate is 100%. It's a small school; the senior class is only 50 students.

They built the new school in the middle of town, thus highlighting its position of import within the community.

So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them.

Washington state does something similar, though it’s more of a subsidy. Education is still mainly funded locally, but the state kicks in with its own funding for poorer districts, so Seattle property taxes subsidize schools across the state in Spokane.

> So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them.

It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership

Everyone forgets it used to be a Democratic state when Republicans were the reviled coastal elites.

That was when "Southern Conservative Democrat" was still a thing. Republicans were reviled in the South because they were literally the party of Lincoln, the most unpopular politician among southern whites for a long time (suffice it to say, black southerners had no problem voting for Republicans when they were allowed to vote at all). The turning point didn't really start until Nixon's southern strategy, and took a three decades to finish.

I'm still surprised that Texas would distribute property taxes equally like that for education. Even if they were run by Democrats, they were never run by the liberal kind.

> It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership

If anything, today it is the folks in Austin (who are predominantly politically liberal) who decry their property taxes being used to fund rural school districts.

People who are actually from Texas know that we help each other out. That's how we roll.

You'd be surprised at how progressive southern states are. The Texas state motto is literally "Friendship." Now, I don't know much about Texas but I did live in Arizona for a few years. It surprised me more than a bit, as someone who grew up in New York.

Arizona legalized medical marijuana quite early, followed by recreational marijuana. Their medicaid program AHCCCS [1] is extremely comprehensive and even pays for Uber/Lyft to the doctor's office and back. Patients are able to see a great selection of GPs and specialists, and the copay is always $0. The accompanying drug plan is comprehensive, also with a copay of $0. AHCCCS will approve expensive modern drugs like Rozeram (supercharged melatonin analog for sleep) if the sufficient documentation of reasonable need is provided.

Cactuses are protected from destruction by law, and must be transplanted when doing clearing for construction. You may find the idea of being able to own a firearm without a license to be unpalatable but the state largely remains very safe crime-wise (perhaps due to that?)

I miss living in Arizona. It's a beautiful state with very caring folk. I saw almost no homeless folks in Phoenix. Folks there seem to really care about their fellow citizens. Southern hospitality is for sure a thing, take it from a daft boy from Brooklyn!

[1] https://www.azahcccs.gov/

> Cactuses are protected from destruction by law, and must be transplanted when doing clearing for construction. You may find the idea of being able to own a firearm without a license to be unpalatable but the state largely remains very safe crime-wise (perhaps due to that?)

My mom lived in Tucson and decided on a visit that I might want to go shooting with her and her boyfriend at the time. Suffice it to say, it didn't go well. BTW, Arizona does very poorly in crime rate (10th highest for violent crime, 3rd highest for property crime), especially Phoenix and Tucson (but is very urban, so there is that also). I'm not sure why you consider it safe crime wise when the numbers say otherwise. They also do very poorly in education (rank 48th). I was really surprised they could beat New Mexico and Louisiana (https://www.wmicentral.com/news/latest_news/arizona-ranks-48...).

It is beautiful. I would love to live in Tucson someday, but with the bad schools, it would have to be after my kid was done with school and I retired.

> I miss living in Arizona. It's a beautiful state with very caring folk. I saw almost no homeless folks in Phoenix. Folks there seem to really care about their fellow citizens. Southern hospitality is for sure a thing, take it from a daft boy from Brooklyn!

When I was a kid, I took a greyhound bus from Vicksburg MS to Seattle WA via the southwest approach (I later did the northwest route, which wasn't as interesting). People would get on the bus from various prisons in Texas (the bus stopped a lot at prisons), New Mexico and Arizona...and were all going to LA. Why bother being homeless in Phoenix (when summers can kill) if LA isn't that far away? Heck, that applies to Texas as well, not just Arizona.

>When I was a kid, I took a greyhound bus from Vicksburg MS to Seattle WA via the southwest approach (I later did the northwest route, which wasn't as interesting). People would get on the bus from various prisons in Texas (the bus stopped a lot at prisons), New Mexico and Arizona...and were all going to LA. Why bother being homeless in Phoenix (when summers can kill) if LA isn't that far away? Heck, that applies to Texas as well, not just Arizona.

You know I wonder if anyone has done a study on how much of the homeless in LA are from out of state. Is it even possible? There is like 65k+ homeless just in LA country. I don't know how they are going to fix this.

There's a point-in-time count of homeless that happens annually nationwide. I believe they capture this information (well, it's more along the lines of how long did they live in the area before becoming homeless).

Arizona isn’t in the South

Last time I looked at a map it was next to Mexico which is as far south as one can travel before leaving the United States. Where do you consider it to be?

I believe he means it isn't in the South, but in the Southwest. The South in the US is actually southeast.

Note the capitalization.

I see, that is odd to me but I learned something new. Thank you for clarifying.

How is the diversity? Is there integration or do different ethnic groups just keep to themselves. Is there upward mobility for some groups but not others?

What about issues like Joe Arpaio and his policies affecting the community. I can't speak for your experience but I wonder are you really seeing the whole picture?

How do you feel Arizona will cope with the coming climate change? At the rate its going Arizona may become unsafe to live in in 10-15 years.

I remember hearing that 15 years ago. I remember hearing about how we are due for an earthquake that will break California into two. That was in the 80/90s. We had great fears of a new ice age in 60/70s.

I don't know what the future holds but thinking Arizona will become unsafe in 10-15 due to climate change is a little foolish.

Sounds like you have "heard" a lot of different things over the years.

Have you look at any actual data? Have you seen the trends in the data that have been going in the wrong direction? At the end of the day, unless the direction changes, it does not matter if it happens in 10 or 15 years or may take longer. It will happen.

Would you care to enlighten us with this data you speak of?

I have hard data that a quake so big never happened.

I have a book from the 70s that talks about the up coming ice age with data to back up his claim.

Have I seen trends going in the wrong direction? It depends on what trends and what start point you pick. Currently things are trending lower than a few years ago as carbon output is being reduced in many countries. I remember when the target was keeping it under 3% degrees than lower than 2% now it sits at 1 1/2%. Soon it will be 1% global temp increase. So things do seem to be trending in the right direction.

There were never great fears of a new ice age in the 60s/70s.

> This distinction can be made because a serious review of the literature shows that there was no such “scientific verity”. There are anecdotes that can be plucked from the record, primarily from the popular media. But a rigorous review by Tom Peterson and William Connolley (with some minor help from myself) shows that, even as the planet was in a short term cooling trend in the 1970s, concerns about greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature. The paper documenting our results has been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Doyle Rice did a nice job summarizing the paper last week in USA Today.2

From http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2008/02/global-cooling-the-und... but there are lots of places where you can find the "we once worried about global cooling" myth debunked.

I've noticed similar situations to this in my own area.

In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be?

> In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be?

This is a question that I'm well-positioned to answer. I moved to this rural area in 2018 after living in Austin for 24 years. I immediately looked for ways to volunteer and help.

I developed relationships with elected and community leaders, started my own "technology incubator" to teach technology skills and classes. I explored establishing a regional technology council with my county judge and Texas state leadership. The community liked that I was volunteering but the actual uptake, expending effort to learn and implement what I was teaching, wasn't there. They didn't know what to do with it. The gap between their world and the world we know at HN was too wide to be bridged effectively.

My experience is applicable to every problem here where someone thinks they may be able to help in some way. Whether it's teaching job skills, helping those who are addicted to meth or whatever, I believe people can't be helped if they don't want to expend the effort to get from A to B themselves.

There are many reasons for this, why offering to help in an economically-depressed or disadvantaged community doesn't yield results. Locals are apathetic, comfortable living in the middle of nowhere with very low expectations, or else they have poor self-esteem and don't believe they can do better.

I don't "push" anymore. I just try to be empathetic and understand their situations. This past Thanksgiving I asked the community to tell me if anyone was unable to get a turkey for Thanksgiving and would like one. Two families responded; I was glad to help. It's little things like that which I can do to help their situation which I feel is the best approach now.

Edited to add: There is an organization here called "Mission San Saba" where a group of ~30 volunteers will pick one house per year to renovate, typically for an older or economically-disadvantaged family. That has been very successful here.

in our county, 20%+ of the housing is idle, owned by out-of-state companies, some of whom pay property taxes and some dont.

I've seen this personally, too. A house I rented until a couple of years ago was owned by a Chinese company, which also owned half of the other houses on the block. We all paid rent to the same LLC that forwarded the cash overseas, and did almost zero maintenance.

I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem.

One thing I don't see discusses very often is the affect that large "master-planned communities" have on a city's housing prices. I've seen at least three cities where mega developers like Howard Hughes Corp own massive tracts of land, but instead of building houses, sit on that land waiting for the price of housing to go up. Sometimes the developers are very open about it. Sometimes not. But instead of allowing a free market to develop 5,000 new homes, they develop one lot here and one lot there.

Or worse — I've seen them build hundreds of homes and then sit on them, empty and vacant, waiting for prices to climb high enough to put the houses on the market. Again, a drip at a time, to keep the housing supply artificially small so they can boost their profits. Meanwhile, people have nowhere to live.

I don't understand why the US does not push back on Chinese ownership of property. From what I understand, there are so many restrictions of owning land in China as a foreigner:

1. The property must be residential 2. If the property is commercial, a foreigner must incorporate in China 3. You may own only one property 4. You must possess a long-term visa 5. You cannot be a landlord, as a foreigner 6. You must pay a 1% deposit and an initial 30% of the purchase price to the seller in RMB, if you are obtaining a mortgage

I think there needs to be a campaign to educate the US population on how lopsided the system is. Only then will politicians start to get massive heat to enact at least equivalent restrictions. Right now its all the rich and foreigners picking away at the carcass that is America.

> The county isn't auctioning off because of tax default anymore, no one was buying these places at $100.

What's the issue with out of state companies owning rural properties nobody wants? If the market is heating up, maybe it's time to run tax auctions again.

In WA state, if there's no bidders, the county retains the land and will auction it again when someone expresses interest (or it some cases, can sell it to a neighboring land holder without auction, like for the 1930s era tax foreclosure I bought last year)

They'll eventually be reclaimed and re-titled one way or another I'm sure. I'm concerned with the larger implications, if my supposition is correct that they are being accounted more valuable than they actually are. These are the leftovers of Countrywide mortgage bonds and such I think.

Makes sense now, thanks!

That's been true for rural areas since the green revolution in the 1950s changed agriculture and manufacturing went overseas. Even if there is still a mine in the hills outside of town, there are fewer jobs at that mine than there were when the town was built out 100 years ago.

Jobs generate demand for homes. Homes cost a lot in areas where there's been more jobs added than homes. In the last decade, the bay area has added seven jobs per every unit of housing constructed.

Vacant housing is a problem, but across the US less than 2% of single family homes are vacant

Vacant housing is only a problem in constrained areas. The vast majority of the U.S. is not constrained. Your summer cabin in Montana isn't depriving anyone of a home, because it isn't driving up prices. Your unoccupied condo in Manhattan is depriving someone of a home, but I suspect that there are not so many of these.

When they did the vacancy tax in Vancouver it only affected a couple hundred properties out of like two hundred thousand in the market.

Yeah, when most people talk about vacant homes, they don't understand that almost all of those homes are just between tenants. They are not actually being left vacant.

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