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Just a note that "occupied" != "can see people milling about". A lot of people (particularly in NYC) treat their apartment as just a place to sleep. During the day, they're at work. For breakfast and dinner, they eat out. In the evenings, they hit the clubs, or go over to a friend's, or visit one of any number of cultural attractions. That's why they live in NYC, because of the density of non-home forms of entertainment. Particularly if you value your privacy, it makes sense to keep the blinds permanently shuttered, leave your apartment in the morning and come back at night, and just sleep & shower there.

Heck, it can make financial sense too. We tend to keep our windows covered most the day regardless of season. In winter it helps to keep the heat in and there's no natural light to miss out on anyway. In summer it helps to keep the heat out, and we mostly don't care about natural light in the apartment because we're outside enjoying the weather. (What's even the point of living in the city with the highest % public green space in North America if we're going to just stay at home bingeing Netflix all evening?)

And you can't necessarily see the lights on when somebody's home because we use the most blackout-y blackout curtains we can get. Urban light pollution has gotten so bad - especially since the switch to superbright LEDs - that they've become a sleep hygiene necessity.

This effect is also exacerbated in wealthier areas by bigger units. Units are less likely to seem lively because people are using a smaller proportion of rooms at any given time, and those rooms may not always even be visible to you. E.g. my grandparents flat would often have looked dark and abandoned from the courtyard, because that side of the flat was unused for much of the day, and often only lot when the curtains were closed, even when they were home and had visitors and a full house.

> Only maybe like 5 out of 100s of apartments consistently had someone living in them.

I would be highly surprised if this were true. I lived in NYC for year and the myth of tons of empty units is pernicious and just won't die. There has been a TON of research on this topic and it all points to there being a huge shortage of housing in the city. As a percentage of total housing stock vacant units make up a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

Anecdotally, my apartment building has 0% vacancy rate. And a newer building across the street has at least 10 apartments vacant for the most of the year.

Anecdotally, i know quite a few boomers that own multiple properties (>3) in manhattan, some of which they rent some of which they keep vacant for when they want to come to the city I feel like at least some % of apartments in the city are visibly vacant most of the time because they are just part time homes for the wealthy.

The research for this does account for pied-à-terres, which do exist in some number but are a tiny fraction of he total and mainly exist in a handful of Manhattan neighborhoods. There are only about 10K of these in NYC[1] which is 0.27% of the 3,644,000 total housing units in the city. This just doesn't seem like a real problem when the rental vacancy rate is shockingly 1.4%[2] (of the 2,183,064 total rental units).

[1] https://www.brickunderground.com/buy/what-is-a-nyc-pied-a-te...

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...

I struggle to believe that pied-a-terres are less than 1% in NYC, particularly in the post covid era. Maybe paid off condos in NYC owned by people who also live in Florida aren't counted somehow? Seems like everyone with a net worth of $2.5mm has two properties.

My best friend's brother has a rent controlled manhattan apartment that sits vacant 80% of the time and is used as a crash pad for a rotating cast of ~12 people, what do you call that?

Why would you struggle to believe something that is accounted for in tax records and other city records?

The median household income in NYC is about $70k almost no one relative to the population has a $2.5mm net worth. There are only 350,000 people in NYC with a net worth of more than 1mm.[1] Anecdote is clouding your understanding here, the idea that there are tons of empty units in NYC is just another luxury belief, it stands up to 0 scrutiny.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/n-y-c-more-millionaires-11000...

Or are corporate owned.

A good friend bought her Hell's Kithen flat (read: condo unit) from a Japanese company. Years ago I had another friend who worked for a company that had a sizeable place in the Village.

Anecdotal, but probably common enough.

There aren't that many. NYC housing data is sliced, diced, and studied by so many agencies, non-profits, think tanks, and so on that someone would notice. There's a marginal number of units that appear to largely unoccupied. Corporate and LLC ownership shows up in tax data and the totals are a drop in the bucket of the nearly 4 million units.

Yes, but you only need one unit per building to be over-bid and that then drives up the prices of other units in that building? It might not be an occupancy issue per se, but it doesn't help the overall residential market.

Housing exists in price bands more or less, so the thing you’re measuring has to be large enough to have an effect on the band. There’s a lot of research on NYC housing issues and no one has ever identified corporate housing as a contributing factor, so there’s a very high burden of proof on your claim.

Desirable neighborhoods in Canada and US typically resemble pre-automobile orientated design type neighborhoods. These are on short supply.

So while there might be enough physical houses around the country/province/city, what makes a place desirable to live extends far beyond the walls of your home.

Regarding your anecdote. I definitely notice the same thing, walk through the wealthiest parts of any bigger city and you will see many/most of the houses completely shuttered for >90% of the year. That also explains why the vacancy rates are low, the wealthiest 0.1% (whom ended up with much of the relief funding during the GFC and Covid) park most of their money in assets, but they are not interested in renting out these houses, so when they buy houses they reduce vacancy rates even when they don't live in them.

Growing housing costs and wealth inequality have been extremely correlated, anyone looking for other reasons for the housing inequality really needs to have a very good explanation why they are not related.

I lived in the West Village for the last 6 years, also facing the courtyard and maybe seeing 20 apts, pretty much all consistently utilized

¯\_(ツ)_/¯