We're in luck. There are 16 million abandoned homes in the US
https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...
Easily takes care of the half a million people experiencing homelessness as well.
https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...
Easily takes care of the half a million people experiencing homelessness as well.
Right from the article you linked, 2nd parg:
"But this doesn’t mean millions of abandoned and dilapidated homes are withering away in the suburbs. Vacant homes can be unoccupied for many reasons beyond being uninhabitable. For example, a house can be vacant because it’s still on the market to be sold or rented or it’s a vacation home not currently in use."
Homes under management for long term housing or resale kept in unoccupied states longer than reasonably expected incur penalties.
Homes kept unoccupied due to being priced out of reasonable band may do so for limited duration--every loophole has to be addressed with financial incentives.
This includes reducing the business potential of domestic and foreign private equity groups picking up homes at depressed rates like what blackstone did.
Residential property rental and transactions related to residential property must be way less lucrative.
The problem is growing; why take a demand-side approach? Especially one so prone to making lawyers and government officials rich? You’re just trading like-for-like as demand grows over time.
FWIW, I’m in favor of nationalizing zoning laws as Japan has done to fix supply.
Also, this doesn't seem to answer my question. How should expropriation be done exactly?
/s
In these comments you seem more concerned about lowering the number of vacant homes than lowering the number of homeless people. I feel that's the wrong approach.
We need to look and take lessons from systems that at least somewhat helped the problem. Of course, adjusting for the US situation, which might be just different. Compared, to, say Eastern Europe, I feel like US can just afford having so many homeless (e.g. free food and medicine for homeless in California). In many other countries homeless would not be able to survive, so in some weird sense we can call it a luxury, not a problem.
Out of curiosity, you do realize there are lots of countries without homelessness, right?
Really curious to learn other ways to solve the problem. What those other countries you mean?
But Japan, for instance, has very, very nearly no homeless.
No, it's a fairly recent and entirely cultural phenomenon. For one thing, there was no homelessness at all in North America before the Seventeenth century or so.
My ski house in Vermont does absolutely nothing for the homeless people in my neighborhood in New York. If you put someone in that ski house what would it do? Sure it would put a roof over their head, but there are no jobs, no soup kitchens, no homeless resources. They would need a car whereas in New York they can walk and use mass transit. The town in VT is already strapped supporting many in their community (I do charity there as well, and let me tell you it's more dire than much of the New York area).
The solution is to house them here in the New York area where they are (and in fact New York does a better than average job of this).
As for it being a misallocation, I own a $1M apartment in NYC and a $300K house in Vermont. If I just owned a $1.3M apartment in NYC my bills would be exactly the same, there would be 1 fewer "vacant house", and the homeless would still be unhoused. The real misallocation is how much I get paid as a software engineer relative to other professions of similar difficulty. I happen to spend my fun money on a ski house instead of a boat or a bunch of vacations, but there's no moral difference between a vacation home and other leisure spending. So really you are arguing that some people shouldn't have such a surplus when there are homeless people. Maybe that's true, but it's one of the most unpopular positions in American politics and if you are an ally of the homeless it's not a fruitful argument to make.
I'm interested in modifying the system which allows for such outcomes, not managing the outcomes themselves. Please take a systems-level approach that seeks root-cause adjustment and not simply an amelioration of symptoms.
I count myself as progressive but am almost disgusted by how many progressives try to muddy the water here because they don't like to face the fact that they have to give something up to make their neighbourhood more accessible to those who are well-off people.
Anyone who doesn't take housing policy seriously on the issue of homelessness is either naive, or doesn't actually care about the issue and instead is trying to use it to push some other agenda.
Where will this person find a job? Where will this person get help organizing their lives? How will this person transport themselves? Where will this person get help for any significant issues in their lives (e.g. substance abuse, mental disorder, etc)?
This is where your "system-level approach" breaks down - you can't bring the support infrastructure for this to a small Vermony ski town and also to all the other small towns in America. This is, as your first post says, poor resource allocation.
Zoom out a bit and observe the broader systems which conspired to guide the invisible hand to allocate a largely unproductive property in Vermont to exist in the first place. I'll be very clear - I'm not advocating for unhoused people from New York to inhabit this property. If that's how you've decided to read it I implore you to go back and begin steel-manning instead.
Even high-functioning and privileged individuals seldom have their shit together 98% of the time. I can't go 5 days without doing something chillingly stupid.
It is frankly astounding that we achieve better than 98% on any homelessness metric. A long forgotten ancestral memory says: there but for the grace of God go I.
Root cause: humans stink individually but we are robust in aggregate.
- Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 25
Many other countries have historically avoided famine in part because their political systems depended upon and heavily favored local agricultural interests--not the laborers, but specifically the financial security and opportunities of the agricultural land-owning classes. And when and where they didn't, e.g., Ireland in the late 19th century or China in the mid-20th century, things played out in predictable fashion.
Such emphasis doesn't create an optimal state of affairs for maximizing overall wealth and economic equality, but it's one way, however primitive, to buffer volatility and minimize the chances of catastrophic food failure; and helps explain why such seemingly unfair socio-political favoritism, often with seemingly perverse side effects, persists today, let alone in the 1930s.
Only since the 1920s and commercial fertilizer use has food become abundant to such a degree, and logistics so sophisticated that we could fathom supplying excess food to multiple entire countries.
It is doubtful that the people who conceived plans for providing such aid foresaw all the consequences of their actions, because there was simply no historical precedent for such a scale of intervention. Food was scarce. Countries usually didn't have enough of it. It only seemed like the best way to alleviate that was to just _give people food_.
As it turns out, maybe that wasn't the best way, but it was lieky a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way.
Do you mean that we don't have enough vacant homes?
I'm hugely in favor of guaranteeing housing, but putting homeless people in random houses and apartments scattered across the country is unlikely to actually work. Do any other countries actually do this to solve homelessness?
We need emergency and temporary housing with heavy support for many homeless people, and then more standard housing for people once they're more stabilized.
Some US homeless are mentally ill, but the majority are people without any safety net-- either societal (since they reside in the US), or familial.
I mean this is essentially true by definition, but it doesn't conflict with mental illness or substance abuse problems being factors as well.
I don't disagree with your point though. We could do much better as a society. There should always be some bare minimum safe and secure housing available, even if it's basic.
edit to add: A couple of people have mentioned that the vacant homes are not in desirable locations. As an anecdote, I live in Park Merced in San Francisco and there are dozens and dozens of empty units here ready to move in. There are also dozens of families living in RVs around Lake Merced a few blocks away. I'm saying that the obvious thing to do is for SF to exercise eminent domain, pay the company that owns Park Merced for the property, then let the people in the RVs live in the homes. That might seem a bit expensive, but SF's annual budget for dealing with homelessness is one quarter of a billion dollars.
We could convert Park Merced into a place of healing and renewal where folks who need help can come and live in a home and have access to e.g. addiction treatment or whatever.
The simple answer is, volunteers first and if that's not enough we can do a lottery. That's just off the top of my head.
> and who’s paying to subsidize the rent?
US Government. We'll take it out of the defense budget. In the interests of National Security and all that.
I really don't think it's that crazy of an idea. The details would be messy but we could house everyone overnight if we really wanted to.
It sounds so wasteful to buy such expensive real estate, lose property tax revenue, and assume perpetual maintenance costs just to house a fraction of the homeless you could elsewhere.
Build more housing and give it to them.
> Isn’t it reasonable to expect your homeless population to backfill with other RV dwellers looking for the same?
Yes, but there's only about 500,000 homeless people in America. It would not quite double the city population. (Last I checked we were around 800,000.)
Park Merced alone could hold thousands more families if we converted the garden apartments and townhomes to towers, although that wouldn't be the only option. The entire Sunset District is almost all single-family homes. SF is a young city, there is lots of room.
> It sounds so wasteful to buy such expensive real estate, lose property tax revenue, and assume perpetual maintenance costs just to house a fraction of the homeless you could elsewhere.
Perhaps, but compare that to the opportunity cost to society of keeping all those families living in RVs. That's the real waste, eh?
Give them homes, let their kids grow up in stable homes, check back in three generations, eh?
Person A: My machine needs 4 GPU to train this model in <6 hours.
Person B: There are 1000000 GPUs in Japan.
Do you see how that's not helpful?
edit: then Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Wisconsin, then, finally, Louisiana.
Meanwhile NYC is <5% which can barely manage to support people moving around within the city, never mind other people trying to move into the city.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/5/17/23108792/nyc-apartment-vac...
Of course, that's the exact thing which is hardest to do, since economy is king and economic incentives don't align with that proposal at all.