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Comment by yesfitz | Hacker News Reader

There are 164,121 vacant housing units in the Bay Area[1].

While that's only ~6% of total housing units, it's still a lot of opportunity for both squatters and these businesses.

Generally though, this situation only feels possible due to compounding systemic failures. In some order: Not building enough housing, income inequality, homeless support, and law enforcement (or lack thereof).

Fixing problems further up the chain solves the problems further down, but is more difficult and probably creates other unintended consequences.

1: https://census.bayareametro.gov/housing-units?year=2020

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Not building enough housing? It seems like they've built 164,121 housing units too many. I think that the more correct explanation is that speculative investors are holding onto property indefinitely rather than selling or renting at a loss, preventing housing from falling back to its true equilibrium value.

I.e. insufficient land value tax rates. California created a class of feudal lords with prop 13 who get to reap disproportionate societal resources from newcomers.

Edit: the solution to which is not allowing squatters disproportionate access to others’ property via unnecessarily long court procedures. Residental agreements should be filed with the county just like land sales are, so a cop can quickly lookup who legally belongs and act accordingly.

Also the need for an "occupancy tax".

You can claim whatever rental rate you want as a basis for your financialization agreements, but you should have to start paying taxes as though you are receiving that number as actual cash rent after some limited grace period.

That would stop most of the shenanigans by private equity in the rental markets.

I proposed something else. This occupancy tax is paid by the legal person who has the right to reside in the unit. Either the legal renter (and this would require leases be recorded) or if there is no renter, the entity that is legally allowed to reside in the unit is the owner. There needs to be no grace period.

Subtract this amount out of property taxes owed today so we have 2 taxes that would sum, and can even discount the occupancy tax of the renter based on their needs (old, disabled, poor....)

The Bay Area (according to the first hit on ddg) has roughly 40,000 homeless people, so I posit that they've built at most 124k units too many.

It's not "indefinite". Most vacant housing units are not vacant for a long time. They might still be under construction or might just be turning over for the next resident in a week.

https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vac...

In LA it's mostly because the power company takes like, months to hook up new buildings for no reason.

And if we built more housing units in the Bay Area (increased supply), do you think that would make speculative investors' housing units increase or decrease in value?

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