What's causing it in the US?
It's that simple.
Now, you may agree with the given reasons for making that development illegal (and/or very expensive), or you may not, but that is the undeniable end result of those policies. We made that bed, now we lay in it; we could theoretically un-make that bed overnight, but there's serious money (and political power) riding on making sure this problem never goes away.
In big cities there are definitely homes that are empty and not listed being used as a store of wealth. In fact just within view of my own home are two houses like that. Both owned by foreign families who wanted a safer place to keep their wealth than their own country (China and India respectively).
Why would you lie like that?
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf
Occupied Housing Units. A housing unit is occupied if a person or group of persons is living in it at the time of the interview or if the occupants are only temporarily absent, as for example, on vacation. The persons living in the unit must consider it their usual place of residence or have no usual place of residence elsewhere. The count of occupied housing units is the same as the count of households
Vacant Housing Units. A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report. (See section on "Housing Unit.")
Also people will just not return the form, and once again they have to estimate.
And in places that impose a vacancy tax, they have incentive to lie or deceive the housing authority to avoid the tax.
And in my neighbors case for example they come by once every few months to pick up mail and probably fill out those types of forms.
In reality there are a lot of vacant homes that aren't counted as vacant.
Good thing we did a census in 2020, and the housing crisis (and associated allegations about absentee owners) far predates that.
>Also people will just not return the form, and once again they have to estimate.
Apparently they're pretty persistent. If you don't fill out a form you'll eventually get an enumerator that shows up at your door.
>And in places that impose a vacancy tax, they have incentive to lie or deceive the housing authority to avoid the tax.
The housing authority is independent from the census bureau. Is there any evidence they share data?
>And in my neighbors case for example they come by once every few months to pick up mail and probably fill out those types of forms.
So they're willing to go out of their way and lie to the federal government in order to maybe move the lower the vacancy rate by 0.00001%, when many (most?) people (as evidenced by this thread) are going off vibes and likely won't care anyways? I didn't know that foreign vacant homeowners had such a tight knit cabal.
Surely there are some pied-a-terre and vacant investment properties, but vacant rental housing in NYC for example was 1.4% in 2023. I'm not sure how they measure this, but even if you doubled the amount of available rental housing, it would still be an insanely hot rental market.
Places that have stable or decreasing housing prices (NoLa, Austin) have over 10% of rentals vacant.
So, whatcha got?
The ALR bans any and all significant development in BC.
Land is not scarce in BC; land that it's legal to build on is.
Most of the land in BC is classified in this way.
Edit: SF itself does have strict zoning. But even if everyone there wanted max density, so they tore everything down and built skyscrapers instead (ignoring the soil problem there), it's a fixed supply of land.
The apartments are still quite expensive even an hour’s train ride away.
This would cause the demand for building materials to skyrocket as billions of people can enter the market to purchase lumber, steel, and energy who 10 years ago couldn't.
The "suddenly, people started being greedy" meme doesn't make much sense.
in 1946 the US had a population of 141M and built 700k housing units
in 2024 the US had a population of 336M and built 90k housing units
>The United States has added almost 5 million housing units since 2020, most heavily in the South and most of them single-family homes, making a housing shortage look conquerable in much of the nation.
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/05/16/housing-boom-....
I think the year after the second world war ended at which point marriages, and therefore household formation, went to unprecedented levels introduces a lot of noise into that signal
That was one month’s worth. There were ~1.5 million built in 2024 in the US.
Only in some areas. There are other factors affecting how expensive houses are across the country, such as materials/labor, preferences for larger/fancier houses, location preference, and increasingly complex/expensive code.
And more space per person, so older houses now house far fewer than they used to. US has more bedrooms without an occupant than ever.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/realestate/empty-bedrooms...