90% of the million dollar+ mansions empty, waiting for their snowbird owners to return.
Look at the Miami skyline at 7-9pm, when people should be getting home. Half the condos with no lights on.
We have a wealth inequality problem, symptoms include housing shortages.
People buying vacation homes on prime beachfront property has nothing to do with housing shortages in cities where young people are trying to live and work.
I specifically quoted the part talking about "million dollar+ mansions" in "intercoastal areas".
The comment about condos in Miami not having lights on at 7-9PM was a separate point, but I don't think it's really true that "half" the condos in Miami are empty for no good reason. People work late, people go on vacation, people go out on the town.
To sit in the dark for 6 hours while paying a whopping $1/kWh would save me 15 cents.
No, it's not. That could potentially be the cost of electricity in somewhere like the South Pole.
"The average electric rates in Sunnyvale, CA cost 31 ¢/kilowatt-hour (kWh)"
https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/sa...
You'd have to provide some shockingly well sourced data to explain why electricity cost in one location is 100 times that of the rest of California, or how the average resident spends over $150,000 a year on electricity (the average per capita use in Santa Clara county is 6.2MW)
It's just really, really high compared to the rest of the country. Or even the next city over, which is what makes it really hurt.
As long as we're talking hypotheticals with no basis in reality, how about:
"If more houses were built then none of this would be a problem"
Discussions about hypothetical forceful redistribution of wealth to prevent people from owning mansions isn't really interesting, IMO.
If money were in the hands of people who want houses built in cities instead of on beaches, there'd be more houses in cities and fewer on beaches.
A land value tax would do a lot to put these underutilized spaces to work.
This has taken many hundreds of units of housing off the market for working families. To the point that many restaurants and such house their workers seasonally. And our electrician, plumber et al drive from over an hour inland where they can afford to live (and these people are not hurting). The house across the street from mine - a teardown - is under contract for $1.7MM.
There is of course the egregious, low-density nature of such a mansion in the first place, something it seems that is especially unfit for the current culture.
You could argue that these empty mansions are a sign of misallocated resources, but the reason there are no homes available in the places people want/need to live isn't that there's no money to build them, it's because it's de facto illegal to build new homes anywhere they would be useful, at any price. It's not a wealth problem, it's a NIMBY problem, a symptom of our political gerontocracy.
This is simply false when stated as an absolute. It may be true in some areas, but not in most of the ones I'm familiar with.
Land value tax would fix this.
Having houses in the country 3 hours from a major city is less useful than having residences in the cities.
Nope. The problem having a investment growth picture so bad that real estate starts to look good as a haven.
https://blog.vanhornlawgroup.com/can-you-file-bankruptcy-and...
That half the units are dark from 7-9PM doesn't mean they're not someone's primary residence.