Housing Crisis
Housing Crisis
Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.
If we had any sense, there would be crazy high taxes on unoccupied housing. There could be short term exceptions for things like remodeling and finding tenants. But it should be prohibitively expensive to sit on empty houses and apartments while people struggle to find affordable housing.
Take it a step further - decommodify all housing.
There is no valid reason why a handful of people should be allowed to own more than they could ever use, specifically so they can use the surplus to extort massive profits from others just trying to survive.
Housing is a human right, it's time we demand it be treated as such.
I have a family member that has empty houses. It's immoral, and severely fucked up. He doesn't give a shit and thinks he's earned the right. He treats them like stocks so far as I can tell.
Important note here: the US homeless count is woefully inadequate to actually get a realistic number. They use the PIT count, which is a
count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons carried out on one night in the last 10 calendar days of January or at such other time as required by HUD.
So if you're unsheltered and not spotted, or manage to sleep with a friend because it's fucking freezing, or your shelter is not official, or maybe you're homeless from March to Oktober, or any of a hundred other reasons, you're not getting counted.
The actual problem is MUCH bigger than the official numbers make it look.
That doesn't mean there aren't still way more empty homes than homeless, just that there are more homeless.
Is the problem 30x worse than it looks? Cus, it'd still be covered then...
Not to mention that there are homeless couples and families that would share a house.
I fucking hope not.
But but but these houses don't have... Batman slaps Robin It's not sleeping in the elements and it's an address to put on a job application.
What really boggles my mind is how many mosty vacant "vacation" homes people have here in Florida. You can drive along some coasts or barrier islands, and most of the big houses along there are totally vacant for a large part of the year.
Not to speak of how they are in a prime spot for being trashed by a hurricane, and taking up space for what could be a public beach or park.
Forget ethics and all that. Just economically, it seems incredibly inefficient. It's like building five star hotels along volcano rims, then leaving them mostly empty.
And research shows it would be cheaper to give each of them a house... Instead of spending on programs that don't work
I'm as leftist as they come and yes I could Google it myself but I wonder if you have specific examples of research that you've seen that you'd be willing to find again and share
I've found some here:
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions
There are 126M homes in the US. The average American moves 11 times per life, or maybe once every 8 years. That means 1/8 of homes, or 15.75M homes, might be "vacant" just to support people shuffling around. That's not real vacancy.
I realize I pulled these numbers from my butt, but so did the original image. Either way, it hopefully shows that we need way more houses built in areas people can live, and it's not as simple as sticking homeless in existing housing.
Yes, and
- second homes of rich people
- Airbnbs which probably have a higher natural vacancy
- damaged and unfit housing
- useless houses in the bumfuck nowhere
You may disagree with some of these existing (especially 1), but still vacant =/= homeless people can or want to move in tomorrow
damaged and unfit housing
This one can not be overstated. I drive past many of these on my way to work every day. Many of them are damaged and unfit because someone died, and no one wants to move out to bumfuck nowhere, even if the house is cheap. So they just rot. Even when I lived in Chicago, there were always houses that had just been allowed to fall apart through lack of maintenance, houses that had become too expensive to either repair, or demolish and re-build.
useless houses in the bumfuck nowhere
I would like to contribute that this covers all of suburbia, from a logistical standpoint. None of that is walking distance to, well, anything. So our homeless person trying to get on their feet will also need a car and insurance, or a whole heap of bus passes (assuming the bus even goes there).
Before I bought my home I had to move every single year, if not more, depending on the whims of the property owner. I was over a dozen moves as an adult by 30.
The average American moves 11 times per life, or maybe once every 8 years. That means 1/8 of homes, or 15.75M homes, might be "vacant" just to support people shuffling around
That assumes it takes a full year after buying the property to fully move into it. If we cut that number in half ( 1/16 of homes, or 7.87M homes) that provides more than enough homes for the homeless population and assumes 6 months for people to move which is still absurdly long.
abandon capitalism, adopt resource based communities
I love how the verdict is FALSE, then goes on to explain that the problem is MUCH bigger than the post implied LMAOOOO
If it went to 1 homeless person and 1million homes, would that be worse or better?
Uhhhh, sure? Maybe try to figure out a way to stop asking such stupid questions. It isn’t some existential problem. Like this very post points out, we have the resources to end homelessness. We simply don’t. We are evil. We want money.
Alright, question. If market prices are supposedly driven by supply-and-demand, and the supply is nearly 30 times the demand, why are housing prices so fucking high?
Because a house today is worth less than a house years from now (probably). Housing is seen as an investment instead of a human need, so you can hold a bunch of them like tickets in the hopes that you can sell them for more later.
As long as banks keep printing money (which then becomes public debt), housing values will continue to rise along with all other financial assets.
The same reason groceries are.
Greed
Demand includes every person currently housed as well and only a small portion of the population is homeless, so the supply really isn’t 30 times higher than the demand.
30 times demand
That's not what this is saying.
This says there's ~650K homeless, let's round up to a million.
Round the post number up to 30, and we get 30 Million empty houses.
This says 15 million in 2022, so the post isn't off by much, given were talking different years.
That said, the second link I posted says 15M homes is ~ 10% of the US housing inventory, and of that 10%, only ~0.7% was homeowner inventory, which means the rest is rentals.
So there's your answer: Landlords.
(Also, homeless people usually don't have the income to afford a rental, let alone buy a house, so they don't affect the demand curve, which is your second answer: Landlords don't give a fuck about the homeless)
Stats like that ignore the fact that they are polling "empty homes" nationally, but the homeless population is majority in densely populated cities, not where those empty homes are. So even if they were given these homes for free, they'd have to be relocated, too.
That's another condemnation of allowing only the market to decide where we build housing. A socialist government would build houses where people need houses.
In my experience, the vacant housing is not built without demand, it's that the demand vanishes.
There were two trailers where they would have been scrapped, but some relatives took then over and kind of refurbished them, and one of those is now home to another relative that would have been homeless otherwise, and the other is a "hobby" trailer until someone else needs it.
Another is a house where the man died and the wife moved to a small apartment because she felt like she needed to be in the city near a hospital, but no one wants the house because the area is the middle of nowhere.
Rural areas tend to have a fair amount of "nobody wants them anymore" housing laying vacant, but they all, at one point, were being used as housing.
I also wonder about the state of many vacant homes.
Mmmmm...asbestos flavoring
It would be interesting to see if the housing units and homeless people are in the same place. My money is that there would be enough to house everyone.
Can't find the chart now. But last census found lots of rural areas in fly-over states have surplus housing.
Like West Virginia had iirc something like 8-10% surplus. Not going to find many people willing to leave cities to move out to West Virginia or Northern Louisiana/Southern Arkansas. People leaving those places are why cities have housing shortages.
Looking at the vacancy data:
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
... it seems as though the vast majority of vacant homes are rentals looking for tenants, rather than rich peoples second homes.
Make of that what you will.
the vast majority of vacant homes are rentals looking for tenants, rather than rich peoples second homes.
They're the same picture.
So who owns these rental homes but is living elsewhere? Perhaps rich people looking to make cash on their second homes while they dont use them?
"HR needs you to spot the difference between these two pictures."
Rentals looking for tenants
Rich peoples second homes
"They're the same picture."
And behind Door Number 2, we have:
"There's not a joblessness crisis, there's a labor shortage. We offered free pizza on fridays for this unpaid Senior Graphic Designer internship, and we're still not getting applicants"
But just carefully, don't give them a home! Make them work for it! What if you just give them a home and they sell it to buy drug? Or what if they just use drugs in the home.
Man if I was young again, I would buy a home to have lots of sex in it. I mean that's what we did with our first home. Why wouldn't a homeless person just use it for drugs...right?
If you give them homes they'll become dependent on shelter, next they might try jobs
One time I saw a guy who was clearly doing totally fine at a job. I swear, he even smelled good. Imagine if ever kid in town had a job! What would we do? It's illegal for kids to work, you know! What message are we sending our kids if guys are just given houses and allowed to work at a job!
Wow that number's gone up I remember when it was 4 vacant houses
There are 27.4 empty homes for every homeless person in the U.S.
If those empty homes are for the homeless people, why aren't they in them??
There are 27.4 empty homes for every homeless person in the U.S.
Every homeless person gets 27.4 empty homes?
Hell I don't even have ONE home for me! And you're telling me there are 27.4 homes for every homeless person! 🤦♀️
Your fact check says the claim is false.
Yup because the number is actually 31, or so it says lower in the page.
It says false because there's fewer homeless and more vacant homes than the meme quotes. That doesn't negate the point of this post at all.
Tom Murphy, director of communications for NAEH, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an email that the figure for homelessness doesn’t reflect the most recent data, saying, “The last time the numbers were in that range was 2010, when the count was 637,077. The most recent federal data is for 2018, when the count was at 552,830.”
The Census Bureau tracks the number of vacant homes in the U.S. on a quarterly basis and, as of October 2019, the number stands at about 17 million. That’s roughly 3.1 million more than the meme suggests.
Depends how you check the statement. If you do "is empty home = 27.4?" Then, sure. But if you do "is empty home >=27.4?" Then the statement is true. And the latter is the more relevant way to do it.
It's ok, Biden and Co. will figure out a way to give it to the illegal immigrants.
It's comments like this that demonstrate just how uninformed Republican supporters are about the actual policies of the two parties.
If you mean giving people housing instead of locking them in cages while they await asylum hearings, then yeah, let’s hope so. I’m not holding my breath though.
Or... no waiting. No cages. No asylum. Turn the fk back around and find another country to migrate to. Or face violence. I rather pay for the violence with my tax dollars than for some migrant trying to sneak into our nation, getting caught, and then paying for their livelihood with my tax dollars.
We pay Israel and Ukraine for violence with our tax dollars, why not extend that to our border patrol?
Biden has actually done very little for immigrants in this admin... And he's kept a lot of Trump's policies on immigration.
So you agree they should be given to homeless Americans?
We have Republicans on Lemmy?
Didn't you know? By default the opposition of the "left" is, "Republican"... apparently there are NO other oppositions.