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I've been to a discussion about house occupation and vacancy recently and one take home message for me was that it's better to frame this topic about vacancy than about homelessness. When we talk about homeless people, we talk about scarcity, people wanting to take something away from us. Once we talk about empty houses, we talk about mismanaged abundance. Let people use houses of the rich they don't need anyway, they don't even use but rather leave it empty than let poor people in.
Nice. It's just sitting there empty and the homeless sleep outside. Good framing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between vacant property location and places where there is a housing shortage once you exclude REIT one multi family complex within major cities (which rely on RealPage to keep vanacy and price up) and ultra high end in NYC
A lot of vacant real estate are second houses at the beach or some other vacation places... there are no jobs there for people to support themselves in fact during winter migrant labour leaves
Housing must be build where there is demand for the said housing, ie where people can get jobs to support themselves which is urban cores along with 25 mile radius before commute becomes retarded.
The discussion I've talked about was in the context of an occupation of a university building standing empty for two years while many initiatives wanted the room. After 28 hours, the occupiers left because they convinced the university to let people use that space.
This might be different in the states but the city I live in is famous for building luxury housing that's used as an investment and stands empty while people sleep in the subway stations. The need for cheap housing is there, but these people have little money so the demand for expensive housing wins that might be used as second houses of the very rich or it really is empty and not used at all, just a future investment.
At some places, people will even leave houses empty to increase the market value of other houses, but that's not happening here according to the discussion.
Easy step in the right direction is to tax vacant property. But there is no demand amount regimes whores for it and peasants can't agree it is the proper strategy here.
But as I said before, this will not resolve the issue. Just a low hanging fruit and an easy W for plebs that we can't have.
And even bigger point I am trying to make. If the owner class wants to keep important slave labours, no problem build housing, infrastructure and social services to match the population influx.
Again peasants cant even agree on this one either. So we get worst form both world lol