Why “Vacant Homes” Won’t Solve The Housing Crisis
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
- The housing myth that just won't die: "we don't have a housing supply shortage because there are more vacant homes than homeless people".
References:
Rental vacancies being good for tenants: www.acto.ca/pr...
Vacation homes in the US census: www.census.gov...
Vacancy rate fact sheet (showing American Community Survey counting units as "vacant" if the owner plans to move within two months): www.census.gov...
"Other" vacancies definitions: www.census.gov...
"Other" vacancies distribution: www.census.gov...
Point-in-time homelessness counts: endhomelessnes...
Study on Americans living "doubled up": nlihc.org/site...
Fertility rates in California linked to housing: calmatters.org...
Fertility rates in Canada linked to housing: www150.statcan...
Canadian young adults increasingly living with parents: / more-25-34-year-olds-a...
Statistics on crowded housing in the US: www.americashe...
Keep Urbanity rolling:
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Subscribe: / @ohtheurbanity
Join us on Twitter: / ohurbanity
Music we used: Medium Rock by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommon.... Artist: audionautix.com/
#housingcrisis #urbanplanning #affordable
"American cities have parking minimums and housing maximums, and then wonder why there are so many cars and not enough places to live."
Nice username.
I agree with you only if the metropolitan area is designed for public transit, wakability, or other alternative means of getting to work besides the private car.
In any major metro area such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Miami, where the majority of people are living in single family detached housing, most people must have a car to get around the metropolitan area. If you start imposing a limit on parking spaces then it's just going to make it more difficult for your average person to get to work.
It definitely makes sense to limit parking spaces when it's high density development centered around public transportation. That makes perfect sense because it's been planned in to the development pattern. However It becomes much more problematic when you're talking about single family detached development styles that are car dependent. These are the kinds of neighborhoods where it's mostly not going to work to limit parking.
I'm not saying I agree with car dependent development patterns. I actually would love it if I could walk to most places. I grew up in a very walkable city outside the US and I kind of miss being able to walk everywhere. But that is not the current reality most of us find ourselves in in the US.
@@1FlyingSolo1 The trick is that lots of parking itself reduces walkability by spacing everything apart, and creating hostile environments for walking. It's a vicious cycle.
Besides, most parking reforms don't immediately get rid of existing parking. They just reduce or discourage extra parking in new developments, while encouraging mixed use. And since this only applies to new development, this makes for a fairly slow and steady process, since it's rare for an area to be completely overhauled unless it has just completely failed, like an abandoned mall. One which ideally allows for plenty of course correction and adjustment along the way. It's a big reason why urbanists prefer incrementalism. So we don't paint ourselves into a corner with a giant fast project that completely replaces an area.
it's the opposite for me. Although pricey there's tons of homes for sale but majority of them have no parking... silly Seattle. Less parking doesn't make homes less expensive. Would you pay $500k for a 1bd condo without parking? That's what it's like in Seattle right now.
American politicians are sociopaths and narcissists. This is why cars are more important than actual people. Especially bigger and bigger vehicles that are used murder children by running them over in a cross walk during a right turn
I graduated high school in 2020 and was planning on going to a university in a city on the other side of my state, but unfortunately it didn’t work out due to limited housing. I was accepted and everything, but because I couldn’t get an apartment or even a dorm room due to covid restrictions, it wasn’t economically feasible for me to go. The housing crisis impacts everyone below a certain wealth threshold, and we really need a big change soon if we plan to fix it.
I want to add something that wasn't directly touched on.
Part of my job has historically been doing structural inspections of vacant homes. It is *extremely* common for these vacant homes to be extraordinarily structurally deficient and unsafe to live in
Sometimes theyd require so much money to repair that it'd probably be cheaper to tear the place down and start a new. These homes are not ready for people to just be moving into
There has been ALOT of builds that comprimise safety to cut cost during construction that is really annoying
Then tear the place down and start a new one.
There's allot of places that are built brand new but purposefully built so that its out of people's budget, its cheaper for owners to have little to no tenants so they don't have to pay for upkeep.
@@Imbatmn57 If someone has a spare house and leaves it vacant instead of renting, then they're just being dumb and losing thousands of dollars. Either way, if being a landlord is that awful, they can always sell their extra properties.
@@davidty2006I’ve speculated it’s a lake of experienced craftsmen in todays world, unfortunately most labor positions are viewed as entry level work by the younger generations
6:04 "So what? You're not guaranteed a home here"
I hear this all the time in Los Angeles. And it's ironic because the *old* people saying it are living on heavily generous rent control.
The answer this video gives is a great argument. I'll have to remember this one.
"We're not asking to be guaranteed a home. We're asking for our local governments to stop actively engineering housing shortages"
i'm asking to be guaranteed a home...
@@UnfortunatelyTheHunger
One problem, though. No one owes you a home.
New Zealand has seen some interesting changes.
Now most large cities must allow developments of up to 3 stories high multi unit buildings except for specific heritage protection sights.
In even larger metro core they can now build up to 6 floors high on almost all plots as long as the plot size allows it. Minimum distance requirements to boundaries have to be maintained
@@shauncameron8390 Actually, everyone does owe everyone housing if you don't want homelessness. And let's just remember that shelter is a necessity and human right? The only other option to having housing is homelessness. Period. Unless you're cool with homelessness. Which most people are not okay with on both sides of the political aisle.
I hear the flip side of this in Santa Barbara: "Building more housing here won't make it any more affordable, because everyone wants to move here."
We had an interesting conversation with our realtor when buying our house in the US 8 years ago. She said she keeps telling developers she knows that if they built a development of moderate sized and priced houses she could sell it out before it was built because so many of her clients are looking for that and can't find it. She said they aren't interested though, they would rather fill lots with houses as large and expensive as the market would tolerate. So even though there's the biggest need in our area for $200k ish 1500 sqft ish homes, we just keep getting development after development of $800k++ giant single family McMansions.
Our particular city is running out of undeveloped land as well, which unless we embrace denser infill will make that even worse and more exclusive over time. To be honest, I not sure now 8 years later that we would be able to afford our current house with how much prices have jumped.
A lot of this is due to certain fixed costs that the developer carries no matter the size of the home. They are always going to maximize ROI by building as big as they can bc otherwise, their profit is reduced.
One sensible solution would be for cities to ask how developers could be incentivized to build smaller, more affordable units. Maybe this could involve streamlining the regulatory process by making turnaround time faster or by lowering fees...
@@1FlyingSolo1 Also removing certain zoning restrictions, like setback requirements and spacing requirements, which force a given house to require more land, and thus increasing the base cost that way. Not to mention sprawl.
@@1FlyingSolo1 We need more nonprofits involved in building housing and more land owners and governments prioritizing the sale of land to nonprofits for development. But we all know that in the end the almighty $$ determines who wins the land grab.
I also believe, but am not completely sure, that unleased or unsold properties can be written off as a loss on taxes for the company/person who owns them. If this sentiment is even partially true, there's a huge lack of incentive to build housing that's affordable.
When in doubt, you need punishing land value tax that would discourage large 1 story mcmansions for a single person and encourage taller buildings where the same lvt will be split among 100 people
I am hidden homeless. I am living with my parents, and when they die I cannot stay. I haven't been able to find a place of my own for 10 years. Also I have a chronic medical condition that is entirely treatable but which means if I end up actually homeless I will be dead.
Life insurance policy(ies)
@@jesseback3536 If the commenter's parents were rich enough to have life insurance or the ability to leave an inheritance, he wouldn't be worried about dying in the gutter shortly after his parents' deaths. This is how generational poverty works; the parents are poor, so the kids end up poor and often even worse off than the parents.
There's hotels to live
Reverse mortgage?
Videos like these are extremely important. They communicate a complicated topic in a simple way. Many adults can't grasp these concepts because they are quite nebulous and require analysis, but you guys cut through all that in a very thoughtful, non condescending, non ideologically driven manner.
Sorry, a lot of the comments here like yours reek of sycophancy
To be fair, counting condemned buildings as vacancies is a pretty stupid idea.
I mean, they are vacant. It's just that people conflate "vacant" with "ready to be used", which this video addressed.
There are also a lot of vacant buildings, especially in some rural areas of America, which have not yet been condemned but probably should be.
But some condemned buildings are in this state willingly by the owner for future demolition
They might not be "vacant" in the sense of people can live in the building, but they're still a waste of land by leaving them derelict instead of tearing them down and building something someone can use just because it's "not currently profitable enough". Same problem, different shape. 😒
yeah, if it can't do house stuff, we shouldn't count it as a house. seems dumb to put them in the same category as functional buildings.
I know that City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes really dominate the category of urban planning TH-cam channels (and I love those channels dearly), but the videos you guys make are SO GOOD and this channel is so underrated! It seems like anytime I see someone post something stupid about housing like "there's so many vacant homes already" you guys have a video for it. I'm excited to see all the new content you all are able to produce, thank you so much :)
This channel is good at discussing housing and economics.
The do a great job discussing the laws and policies and how they could be improved
and especially because this channel isn't afraid to get political!!
I just want to add as a filthy casual when it comes to urban planning: I've heard the argument before that there is already a lot of vacant homes. I did not know that it seems to be the data was miscontrued, as presented by this video, which is why I clicked on the video so i could learn and educate myself. I guess what I'm trying to say is the people who posted those comments maybe weren't "Stupid", just uninformed like myself. We shouldn't call each other stupid, but instead try to be understanding and build solidarity with one another.
Like Randall said, I think most people who say "there are so many vacant homes" are neither stupid nor willingly misconstructing the reality, they just haven't been given all the facts. I also feel like it's somewhat strawman-y to present the argument as "there are so many vacant homes... so there's no need at all to build more/we should literally PREVENT further house building". I literally never came across anyone who said/believed the second part, literally all "housing advocates" call for unprecedented amounts of affordable housing to be created. The point of "there are so many vacant homes" is that the mere presence of vacant homes/more housing supply, alone, will not end homelessness, and that there most likely are ways to more fairly distribute the housing we do have; in other words, that even though more housing supply (especially deeply affordable housing) would undoubtedly help, it is a crisis politically engineered to be way worse than the material reality "requires" it to be (material reality which is itself, of course, also politically engineered).
My hometown is on the path to learning this lesson. Population under 100k and a median income of roughly $30k, yet the only kind of housing they've built locally in the last few years is billed as "high end luxury apartments." So as with most larger cities, our small 20th century country downtown area is on any given night full of patrons and workers who will never be able to afford to live there. And then the local powers that be wonder why there's never enough parking downtown. 🙄
That's an issue too. Still to some degree they allow more basic flats to be vacated but we need to get get more bassic housing build. Because it taxes time till an luxury building gets to be more normal after 30, 50 or even 70 years.
In many places housing choices are limited. In NYC single family homes are impossible to get in Manhattan or close by. While in other places only entire 4 or 5 bedroom homes are available.
I think that in a lot of parts of the U.S., so many apartments are sold as "luxury" because they can be. There are so very, very few apartment buildings that they can all be rented/sold at luxury prices because there's so much more demand for them than there is supply. Ironically, I think this problem is more acute in small cities precisely because in North America, there's an assumption that anyone who doesn't want to own their own single-family home is a "city person", and that those people should move to big cities where apartment buildings are more predominant.
Watch them destroy downtown and use valuable land to add more parking. Thereby exacerbating the housing shortage.
It sounds like the builders are are only building luxury apartments because that is the only profitable projects available in your hometown. There’s no reason for a company not to seek profit by building more unless the city’s regulations are blocking it.
Any extra housing built is good
It's premises on a third option as well, that all housing is in a relevant location. Housing in Thunderbay isn't going to help Toronto, or housing in Detroit help NY.
yep. and having good housing and transport where it’s needed makes everyone better off… for instance, more people in cities means nature can be left alone to flourish.
Some people think homeless people can move to where more housing supposedly is. How? They don't have money to move in the first place, it's why they're homeless. You can attempt to bus them off but 1. that's literally just shipping off your policy failures to someone else to deal with instead of fixing them yourself and 2. most homeless people who do get shipped off end up returning anyway. They know the streets and what help they can get better than a place that may have less resources to help. So it ends up being a huge waste of money.
I’m surprised this didn’t get more time in the video because this seems like the biggest flaw. You’re not going to help things much by shipping homeless people to condemned shacks in Gary or ratty farmhouses with no jobs in rural Kansas.
@@ztl2505 Even empty houses in some exurb of the same city won't help if the people who need housing can't afford the time and cost of the huge commute.
Likewise, government refusal to address housing costs in San Francisco is driving up costs of living in Austin, Nashville, Phoenix, and other "mass exodus" destinations.
I’m glad someone made this video. I’ve argued with so many people about this very issue.
There’s also the issue of population increasing and needing empty homes so that people who want to move have a place to move to.
You two are doing an absolute public service. Clear, well reasoned communication. These videos have a global reach, you may tip the scales and an entire city or country, or many, may go down a different path because of these videos.
No they won't. Either you're a child, or you have never experienced poverty.
I'm homeless, and TH-cam videos will never do anything to end greed. Government intervention is what would do anything.
But that will never happen either.
@@spaghettiinadictionary8645 what?
You didn't address anything I said. Just some irrelevant incoherent statements.
NONE of this absolves the housing market of anything. The market IS the problem. We treat housing as a commodity to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and not a human right, to be provided regardless of an individual's wealth.
That said, who said that we don't need to build more housing? We are well aware of that. We only point out the vacancy statistics as an example of the market's inefficiency.
The Market is distorted by local Zoning Laws like Single Family Housing areas, Parking Lot requirements, Height Restrictions, etc.
Unfortunately, people being forced to move to rural locations with few opportunities or resources, or being forced to live with family or roommates, is now considered normal and acceptable. If you want to live alone, or with a partner and kids, you need to be financially successful enough to meet a certain income threshold for a market-rate home. Currently, you need to make between $75k and $80k per year to be able to comfortably afford a median priced 1 bedroom apartment in the U.S. without being considered "rent-burdened."
N.B: I am sure there are places and people who make it work with much less. There are places with below the median cost of housing, and people who are willing to make sacrifices to personal comfort to make living alone work.
well with other cultures they live generations together like that anyway. i guess we have to learn from them on how they do it.
@@marlak4203 It's not a matter of cultures, it's a matter of whether people have the money.
@João Santos well i said that because of how things have changed where so many have to live like some others do.
And yes money is sorely needed for how things are today to afford this stuff
Where I live the average apartment is $2,000 a month or more because there just are not enough moderately priced rentals being built. Everything being built new is for "luxury" housing with high prices. $2,000 a month means you need to earn between $25 - $33 a hour to not be overly burdened by the cost of rent (1/3 - 1/4th of income). That is significantly higher than the average worker in this area makes. As a result we also have a worker shortage.
My city has a shortage of affordable housing. I lived with my parents longer than planned because of the cost of apartments here. It was actually cheaper to save up a down payment and buy a small house. Recently a new apartment complex was built on my street. The rental cost is 3 times the mortgage on my small old house. Those apartments would take my whole monthly income!
Video breakdowns like this are really important. A lot of those pushing the vacancy argument have their heart in the right place, but use data without actually understanding it or copying what they’ve seen on the internet. Remember to do research about things you care about!
This might be the best and most needed video I've seen yet in the discourse around urbanism online. The "there's already enough vacant homes" argument almost feels like a NIMBY talking point that has somehow infiltrated pro-housing and density circles for a while now
When I say "look at all the vacant properties compared to the number of homeless", my point is that the system does not care about the homeless or housing burdened, and building more housing is not going to cater to their needs. And it's obvious talking to any YIMBY that this is true - bring up "affordability" and any specific points related to it, and their answers are "build more housing" while glossing over any specific concerns about the homeless and marginalized being housed adequately.
A "Yes in my backyard" should be wholeheartedly advocating for the homeless and gentrified, as those are the very people NIMBYs do not like. Middle class folk being squeezed out is just a side effect of NIMBY ideology probably....
Walking around Toronto this weekend and seeing the anti-homeless architecture and lack of benches (admittedly an issue here in Ottawa too) I was stroke by how incredibly stupid it is we don't just house the un-homed. They exist, and you can make our cities terrible to try to not see them, but they're going somewhere. Just spend the money on housing you spend on putting spikes on ledges and paying cops to break up their encampments.
in los angeles the government spends more on policing and jailing homeless people than it would cost to fully pay for socialized housing for them
@@connorhalleck2895 Wasn't it LA þat evicted people from homes a small group of people built and donated to þem wiþout giving þem þe opportunity to even get þeir belongings? It doesn't surprise me þey're just trying to push þe problem somewhere else instead of actually addressing it.
@@connorhalleck2895 it keeps the housing market profitable
@@toyotaprius79 exactly, manufacture scarcity and pad the pockets of the overseers and the slavers and lords they work for. It clearly costs the people less for everyone to be housed but the parasitic classes are never going to be persuaded because the economic burden placed on the people IS their wealth. Defund the police? How would such relatively few people be able to safely leech off of billions without them?
We can call our representatives and write sternly worded letters all we want but at some point it has to be accepted that the solution is not to ask nicely.
You all seriously missed the point….ever see those videos of people who win the lotto and two years later they’re broke and indebted…because they can’t manage money!!! it’s a tool, not everyone understands how it actually works. The word is ‘Privation’ maybe look it up. I love that you all care but as a bleeding heart liberal it took me a long time to understand the difference between helping and enabling. Biggest take away was the gift of wisdom that comes form experience > Compassion must be tempered with Logic
Thanks for pointing that out. With housing being a very localized market, aggregations over larger regions or whole countries are not helping at all. We are ourselves in the process of moving out because in our home city the costs of living somewhat nice are way over the top and two rooms (not two bedrooms) are pretty tight with a child. Thankfully, work from home allows us to move away without changing jobs as well, but not everybody has the possibility
I appreciate that you acknowledged the problems this mentality causes in getting real policy passed.
@Kougami A bold and unusual take
Also the houses available must match the demand. A single family house in a car-dependent area is just too expensive for a category of people.
that's part of the problem is that there are a lot of vacancies that exist because they are unaffordable. There's no shortage of housing, there is a shortage of affordable housing
@@stacesmr8407 average newbuild in my town in northern england is 250k.
Compared to a old terraced building being more than half the price. Not to mention wages are 20k a year on the low end and rn thats bearly enough to live nevermind anything else.
Thanks for this video. This is important and a lot of people need to see this.
Just wanted to say I appreciate that you guys are one of the only urbanism channels which regularly tackles housing issues and repeatedly drives home the point that yes, we do need more dense urban housing. It's a controversial topic that draws a lot of ire from certain crowds on both sides of political aisle so it's brave of you guys to go there not just a little bit, but in many different videos. This is one of your best, most concise videos yet. Suggestion for a future, related topic: Would you be willing to delve into some of the ways governments and nonprofits can contribute to increasing housing supply in a way that directly offers affordable housing to residents without constricting overall housing supply?
And you didn't even directly mention transportation. Even if everyone had a spacious home and their desired number of roommates, many people might still need housing closer to work and their daily needs. And that's not just a frivolous want, for people with mobility issues or other challenges, proximity to nearby services can have a major impact on their quality of life.
1 in 5 homes in Maine are “vacant”. We are “Vacationland”, where seemingly every rich person has a summer home that they spend ~1 month in per year. Any apartment building near any kind of beach, lake or ocean, is now an airbnb. And I can’t afford to move out unless I want to live in a town of like 300 people in the middle of nowhere
If you want to have a lively, functioning city, you need housing that is affordable for young people and essential workers like serving staff, nurses or shop workers
Lively, functioning cities were never exactly known for being affordable especially around the downtown core.
@@shauncameron8390 that's simply not true. The quality of less expensive apartments wasn't the best, but they were there.
Thank you again to putting forward the data again and packing in a way easy to understand by the average person. You guys are doing a great job and I'm always looking forward to your next video.
Often and sadly among those 15 million homes are many that are about to fall apart..
The Detroit area can be a good example housing is cheap but (un)employment options are limited and inner suburban areas are only partly occupied and many homes get abandoned after every few years.
Maybe the answer is just to bulldoze the houses that are too expensive to repair are the homes that are abandoned
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 This has been done but it is difficult to get this sorted out with different owners.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 That's what rust belt cities like Cleveland and Detroit.
Exactly. Sticking a homeless person in a collapsing house with literally no employment available nearby is not a solution. Housing is not fungible across an entire country.
@@thelight3112 Why not create programs that are easily accessible that allow poor people to purchase and rehab homes? Why does opportunity and sustainability have a direct correlation to profitability?
All i hear when I hear people discard "shipping homeless people off" to low opportunity areas is, "We'd rather homeless ppl stay homeless until they can become profitable enough to stay in unaffordable housing in economic opportunity areas".
Many people talk about remote work.
Do we just leave homeless homeless and abandon blighted cities until they become attractive RE investments?
What i miss in the video are not only the costs of a home, but also the costs to commute (time and money) for those who have a work but can't afford to live closer to it, just because of low income in a high rental market...
They had been topic of different video those two had made.
In general it seems these people ignore the idea of more specific supply and demand combined with location.
Even if there were 15 million vacant homes ready for people to move in, if those 15 million homes were to hypothetically all in be Anchorage Alaska that doesn't mean there is not a shortage of housing in (staying with the US) New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles; a lot of people want to move to those places but cant, regardless of those hypothetical homes in Alaska.
It just shows very surface level thinking in my opinion.
Fantastic video as usual, always great to go over the nuances. And this doesn't even touch on the complexities of homelessness vs unmet housing needs, and that solving affordability can't fix all of the failures which lead to homelessness.
The core issue is the pricing. Homes are really expensive unless you're willing to move away from everyone you know and can telecommute for work. The US government could fix this if they really wanted to. They could just eminent domain areas outside of large city centers, hire contractors to build standardized homes, and sell at a reasonable profit while undercutting the currently overpriced market. However, there are lobbyist groups for the real estate industry that prevent any kind of regulation or acts like this.
Which includes ordinary homeowners.
Really thankful that you guys mentioned other groups that suffer as a result of constrained housing supply.
Building my career in the UK without moving to London at some point seems almost impossible, yet the housing market there is prohibitively expensive. I know rather successful people who are sharing with flatmates with very different schedules to themselves, resulting in them struggling to get adequate sleep.
Some effort has been made to move various industries outside of London, but now those cities are running into the exact same problems with housing supply.
I'm really glad you are talking about these issues. I live with roommates right now, and I can't afford to move back to my hometown because rich people gentrified it.
The fact is that on the left are actually homes, an apartment. On the right is what amounts to a slum. On the left is likely luxury apartments, and that is likely the problem, where they are more an asset or used only sparingly when the owner is in town
Or a reaction to the problem of zoning restrictions making luxury apartments the only high-density housing developers are legally allowed to build with a decent ROI.
Last year, upon moving back to Calgary, I spent 4 months looking for a place to live. I was looking with and without roommates, all over the city, and offering months of rent up front. We have a problem. Fortunately, I had family I could stay with while looking, but many don’t have that option.
I wouldn't have figured this out on my own. So glad you're here to unpack these thought shortcuts into more nuanced discussion.
I'd take everything in this video with a grain of salt. Lots of cherry-picked data, and data sets left out -- like how many of the vacant homes that aren't on the market are just held as equity assets for investment portfolios
I’m struggling with the beginning of this video. There were 367,337 homes in Seattle in 2020. If 1% of those homes are vacation homes that’s 3,673 homes that could be available for primary residences instead being vacation homes.
In 2020 there were 11,751 homeless people in Seattle. 5,578 were not in shelters. Providing those homes to the homeless would reduce the homelessness in Seattle by 31% or nearly 1/3. And that’s one house per person. I imagine homeless families would prefer to live together. If all the spaces in shelters were then occupied by the unsheltered it would reduce the unsheltered homeless population nearly 2/3 (66%).
It’s not a solution for the whole problem but it’s a significant chunk.
The issue I have here is we don’t need a lot of the vacant homes available for the homeless. 15 million vacant homes and 600,000 homeless. We just need 4% those vacant homes to be suitable to provide a house for every homeless person.
They’re not all vacant the way you think is not a sufficient argument for “it’s not a solution” to me. Are 4% not available.
And yes, I get that not everyone is in an ideal housing situation, and that crunch is larger and we should keep building houses to help with that issue, but if I can start getting people off the streets quickly I want to.
Personally, I'd like to rebuild the downtown area of [nearby small and fast-growing city] so that most of the buildings have shopping in the ground floor, then a layer or two of offices, and then three to five floors of good, solid apartments. Ideally interconnecting them on the office level, and adding incentives to optimizing the ground floors' tenants in order to get as many of the facilities that a person is going to need on the regular within easy walking distance. Sort of a semi-enclosed version of the 'superblock' concept that urban planning nerds like to talk about.
15,000 vacant houses in Baltimore City-a serious undercount. The city's population has been dropping by an average of 5,000 per year since the 1950's when the schools were integrated, from 951,000 in the 1950 census to 576,000 now.
Gotta love the inherent racism of human beings.
Baltimore = Detroit 2.0
This channel is pure informational bliss! I feel blessed to be watching such a fine tuned content that is grounded in reality and bringing solutions to the problems that exists.
Not just pandering around a problem while at the same time painting it with propaganda!
Houses have been, specially after the 70's, slowly but surely turned into investment sinks for the rich in an attempt to slowly liquefy housing assets. This is where the LAW should be applied.
Furthermore, due to increased lobbying, as someone who's rich doesn't want his house assets to go down, the increasing regulations towards building made so that building new homes IN PLACES THAT ARE IN NEED OF THAT is extraordinarily hard. This is the other thing where law needs changing.
I live in Honolulu, a building was put up a couple years ago in a part of town that the government is trying to revitalize and i remember hearing that the "affordable housing" units the building had were studio apartments starting at around $250k.
I volunteered at a charity that focused on housing the homeless in a major US city. Surprisingly, while housing was extremely expensive in the city, there wasn’t much of a low-end housing shortage. There were honestly more than enough $100 apartments to go around compared to the number of people we were estimating would need the housing.
The problem is, there are certain requirements before you are accepted into one of these housing projects. You can’t have an alcohol or drug addiction, and have to be mentally stable enough to hold a job if you’re physically capable of doing so. The vast vast majority of homeless in my city either were addicts, and thus would threaten the community as a whole if they were given housing, mentally unstable with the same result or simply didn’t want to hold a job even if they had to sleep outside.
The struggle wasn’t finding housing for the homeless we were trying to help, the struggle was finding homeless people who would be able to function in the affordable housing without destroying the apartment and the community. While there is a major housing crisis in my city, the main burden falls on low-medium income earners who just spend more of their paycheck on housing, with them rarely ending up on the streets. To solve the real homeless crisis, it’s a lot more complicated than simply increasing my the housing supply, or as some idiots suggest, putting homeless people in vacant apartments owned by landlords.
I don't know if this is some kind of bad joke but obviously the problem lies with the addiction and mental health conditionality in the first place?
@@Anglerbe Of course it does. Those are much more difficult things to deal with though, and just “build more housing” as many people blindly suggest won’t make much of a dent in the homeless crisis.
It’s even harder considering it’s extremely difficult to force someone to take addiction therapy in a closed environment. The government just isn’t willing to force that on a large group of people. Plus, a lot of the issues experienced by those people can’t be solved with counseling. The reality is, there are some mental diseases that can’t be cured, and round the clock supervision for the rest of their lives is the only way to keep them functioning in a facility. I’ve seen many people make their way out of homelessness, and it’s always the ones who have the capacity to desire greatly to end their addiction or to get help. The ones who don’t desire that, or don’t have the capacity to desire that can’t be helped in a sustainable way unless you have the authority to force them to get help.
Yes, and another thing that fucks up housing supply is housing codes.. don't tell me a house is unsafe when the alternative is literally living on the street.. who cares if I have running water or a working toilet when I have a gym membership, and I work most of the day. Just wish cities would leave well enough alone.
If you're considering a vacancy tax... pass an LVT.
Yes this
what’s an lvt?
@@ltandrepants Land value tax. Its a property tax, but not including the value of any buildings.
@@WillmobilePlus Lol do you think property taxes are non-constiutional? I have news for you.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 I Believe people who have a second house, are already paying property tax on it whether it’s empty part of the season or not. I don’t have a second place, but I know people who do and it means of paying property taxes in two places.
Okay I understand that all vacant homes are not alike, but when I went from living in a tent to living in a condemned mobile home, I felt much safer, warmer, and more secure. It has draw backs, I was there with permission, but this is not an answer to why we as a society are okay with letting building sit empty and kicking homeless people out of them, while we expect them to disappear or be shoved off a cliff into an abyss. Once everyone is sleeping inside, then I am willing do discuss developments.
4:35 "homelessness is only the tip of the iceberg" this, this should be said more often 💯
woke up this morning to some new oh the urbanity 😎
It’s also important to keep in mind that simply adding new housing stock doesn’t solve housing shortage if that new housing isn’t financially accessible to the majority of people .
The research is pretty strong that even so-called “luxury” housing helps affordability by soaking up demand that would otherwise be looking to live in existing housing stock.
In my city, it is pretty much impossible to find 3-bedroom apartments in the inner-city, even with a reasonable budget. If you want an apartment with a room for kids and a room for guests, storage, and work-from-home space, it doesn’t exist. Its no wonder you can’t find kids in my neighbourbood. The only 3-bedroom places available are luxury townhomes worth millions. Its sad, but i will have to move if i want kids.
This is a pattern you see throughout much of the developed countries. Especially in places like Japan or South Korea which have below replacement level birth rates so their population is decreasing (you'd think other countries would take note. The only thing keeping America and Canada afloat is immigration). If you want more kids, the country and cities shouldn't make it so hard to have them in the first place. It's no wonder many people from my generation are delaying them or going "eff it, it's easier to just not have kids"
An old grade school in my area was refurbished and apartments made for low income seniors and disabled people. An old Fabric Mill in my city was refurbished and made into studio, 1br and 2 br apartments and is very nice, walk to stores and park.
Even if they would to confiscate rich vacation homes in Florida or Aspen snd give them to the homeless, the maintenance on those houses would cost a lot more than just paying rent for some one bedroom.
I think you're missing entirely the political purpose behind the comparison between the number of vacant homes and the total number of people who are street homeless: the point is to highlight that we have the resources and capacity to solve the problem but lack the political will.
My favourite example of this was that during pandemic lockdowns in the UK. The "Everyone In" scheme was a temporary government assistance programme to offer every street homeless person in England self-contained accommodation so that they would not have to share living space with others during the coronavirus lockdown, so as to prevent the spead of disease. They solved street homelessness using empty hotels and hostels virtually overnight. Then the coronavirus panic died down, the programme ended and people were left contending with the previous underfunded and inhumane system. The Government demonstrated that street homelessness is a policy choice and one they stand by whole heartedly.
I agree with your analysis of intent, but I also think that OTH has done a good job of showing why that rhetorical choice doesn't accomplish what advocates hope it would.
Why isn't this comment at the top? It's amazing.
It wouldn't fix everything, but it sure would help to tax secondary homes in order to help pay for the building of homeless people's primary homes.
A bigger source of potential housing is underused commercial space and hotels that could be converted for cheaper than new developments.
This was a really amazingly made video, changed my mind!
I used to be in the mindset of "Just move away." putting aside the cost of moving, its really unfair to tell a young couple or even a single person to uproot their entire lives. the psychological pressure of leaving family and friends is hard enough.
Now they know how immigrants feel.
Tell that to the "Commiefuckya is a hellhole and everyone must leave now!" crowd, who act as if everyone in California has the money and option to just suddenly move to Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and Arizona, let alone wants to move thousands of kilometres away somewhere even less developed...🙄
A problem with counting out apartments 'simply' being between tenants is that landlords artificially raise prices by keeping their homes vacant and intentionally listing the apartment with a price drastically above market level, so that the price will rise, as there is not enough supply for a lower price. Even worse is that landlords do this in conjunction with each other. Sometimes, apartments will be vacant for more than 6 months to several years, just so that landlords can finally get the monthly price they desire. It can also be that the apartments won't be listed at all.
In the end this dramatically raises the price of apartments and is partially what prices people out of cities. This problem is becoming very rampant in the Netherlands, to the point that we created a term for these landlords: house milkers. Big-scale landlords with > 100 homes/apartments milking the absolute shit out of a basic necessity.
There needs to be a tax or fee that constantly increases over a period of time (ideally more often than landlords are allowed to raise rent) for rooms that remain vacant. They could raise the rent to try to cover that, but then they would risk owing more money because no one can afford it.
Make it cost more money than its worth to have higher than affordable rent. That might also generate revenue for cities to address problems (if they were competent).
Great data viz! I subscribed.
I saw an ad that made me spew out my drink. The rent was $844 for a one bedroom, which now, sadly, is low in my area. It had the usual suspects. A fee to pay for background and credit checks. A list of rules and standards to abide by. No pets. Only near the bottom, you had to make 4 times the rent and have a credit score above 719, or have a co-signer that met these requirements, or pay all rent upfront. No negotiations. I did a little research, and the house is old, and swapped hands a lot in the last two decades. I figured maybe it was decked out in updates, because the street alone had a poor walkability score, and the outside looked different from the old pictures now. Nope. It had a weird smell, water stains, painted over tile in the one bathroom, signs of black mold, buckling laminate, and bonus, the basement was flooded. This was the one bedroom $844 a month rental. The kitchen and doors were beautiful though.
I like your channel for the Canadian content, but this one was too focused on US statistics. I know Stats Can has data on this, but maybe it's not detailed enough. But I was hoping you'd mention how so many vacant homes in Canada are in places like the Muskokas. Good luck shipping the homeless population there!
We actually did an equivalent Canadian video a year ago (search “myth of 1.3 million vacant investor homes”), but the US has better data so we made this as a follow up
A very well-informed and argued video. I did have to laugh when the video was interrupted by TH-cam for an advertisement... for Gucci. WTF TH-cam???
Americans donate 485 billion per year to charity. It would cost 102 billion to build enough houses for the homeless. And 9 billion per year to cover their taxes, insurance, and utilities.
There are more than enough actually abandoned properties that could be cleared and replaced with a tiny home (400sqft - 1000sqft) for a homeless person or family.
1000 square feet is not a tiny home. 240 square feet is not even tiny. I have lived in a 64, 120, and 200 sqft homes that I built. The 200 sqft'er felt like a mansion.
Same answer as always that no government responsible for the shortage, nor their supporters will admit: it's a fixable problem, but they're not interested in solving it.
They can likewise deal with the consequences associated with it: increased homelessness, lower desirability from prospective businesses or residents, lower tax base, increased detris from the homeless and decreasing public services, increased difficulty in attracting labor or alternative industries, and an overall decline in quality of life.
If you're not relatable to the people you lead, how would you understand their perspective and drives?
Tangentially related, but a lot of unhoused people live out of their cars - I think at the very least, if we're living in a car-centric hellscape, the absolute bare minimum we can do is support this subsection of the unhoused with all this excess parking, especially for parking garages. But we don't even do that - even when you own a car, you can't live in it unless you're constantly on the move or pay for a campsite or parking space. The fact that I'm even suggesting this as an approach is a poor reflection on both the housing situation and how car-centric North America is.
I couldn't tolerate living with my parents because my mother is abusive and a hoarder but I can't afford an apartment. I'm disabled and can't work until I finish my degree (meaning I'll get a job that doesn't cause me indescribable pain like all the other positions I've tried to hold). I was able to move out with my sister but our dad pays the rent/utilities. I don't even like the apartment complex but everywhere else is WORSE. I have my medications sent to my parents house now because someone once stole my insulin...
Thanks for this video. I've often repeated this misconception.
Many homeless are homeless because they want to be that way. They want no accountability. Homeless families should be the first ones we should try to help.
Even families are bad sometimes. The father and mother refuse to work but keep having kids.
On the issue of homelessness, tools like you need to be ignored
Thanks so much for this analysis!
Housing market in which the resale market never goes down in value, only up. This only results in the pricing people out of the market, so even if there is enough housing the cost does not meet the demand. A house that sold for $50k back in the 70/80's is selling for at least $300k now, if the trend does not change in another 40 yrs those will cost $1.3m (in a couple cities this is already the case). There are people literally earning over $100k but can't afford housing due to needing to stay in the local area of the office.
$300k is an extremely low price in most urban markets these days. Realistically that house that cost $50k 50 years ago in a cosmopolitan coastal city is now 800k-2 million+ (especially on the west coast). In LA, the only housing units that are $300k are in need of demolition or extensive renovation
I was introduced to georgism just over 2 years ago.
The issue is that land is scarce: so that landlords are able to profit just by holding land and improvements are added in/around it. What is needed to prevent the use of housing as an investment is property taxes high enough is discourage such "passive income".
Stephen Punwasi explained in a long Dec 3, 2020 Twitter thread (that I bring up by searching for "capitalism is designed for one kind of tax") that for the average person, replacing income taxes with property taxes may not actually increase your taxes much. Since the very wealthy tend to have large land holdings.
Vacation homes should be an asset to housing. There you have homeowners who are paying property taxes, but aren't demanding the same services as residents. The failure of governments to leverage this source of extra funding to make affordable housing for the people who work in the town, often deliberate, policy failure; usually motivated by even wealthier full time residents who wish to keep the town as effectively an amusement park for the very rich.
The point is, the argument is anti-capitalist.
Incredible video, I never knew this but I'm very glad to become educated on the topic, and great visuals!
Thanks for this very thorough video.
A lot of those "repairs" and "renovations' are often just excuses to get low paying tenants out, or to keep a place empty while they market different apartments, to make sure the available supply is low, and prices (and write offs) are high.
I'm glad I subscribed when I see videos like this one. In-depth research, straightforward presentation, and detailed breakdowns all put together. Great job!
So I'm unhoused and at an emergency medical respite due to surgery and my disability. It's in a major-ish city. Someone suggested I move to smaller town or even a different state. With my medical problems, I have to have a really good medical team and zero laspe in care. So yeah, remote fishing cottage ain't gonna cut it.
You keep bringing up Boston. I will point out that Massachusetts itself (and it's counties) keep housing prices high, even in it's not so nice towns.
A lot of actually vacant houses are places where the windows are smashed out, the roof is leaking, the insides are rotting away, and are generally uninhabitable, and people do just go and live in them anyway but just throw their dirty needles and other waste on the floor. I wouldn't intentionally put anyone in these places as a solution to homelessness.
This means children, teens, and kids who grew up in the home... are all considered homeless, since they don't legally own the home.
As they're not legally old enough to work and pay taxes.
As a San Franciscan, this topic is close to my heart because so many NIMBYs use misleading statistics about how many "vacant" homes there are in the Bay Area. Frankly the argument is employed by both conservatives and liberals.
As it relates to our new vacancy tax, I was somewhat ambivalent about its passing because even if implemented as described, it will be a drop in the bucket when it comes to increasing supply. But on the other hand, implementing a vacancy tax *finally* moves us one more step closer to addressing the root cause of lack of supply: not building enough new housing -- because there is now something to appease the people who can't shut up about vacancies.
At the end of the day, a vacancy tax is an incorrect solution to a problem of our own making -- scarcity of housing. Ultimately, I would love a world where we streamline new housing construction so much that excess vacancies put downward pressure on rental prices. And the "tax" on landlords who could otherwise rent a vacant apartment, but aren't for some reason, would be the opportunity cost of not renting it.
It takes 3 years now to evict a bad tenant.
A very much needed video, but unfortunately this is way too rational and well explained to get the point across to certain people online haha
He is 💯%, its definitely greed. The real estate people make more money when apartments stay empty. The get a huge tax break capital loss.
There is an ever increasing problem in the US rental market. Corporate consolidation. Huge hedge funds are buying up lower end homes and apartment complexes and using new software to collude with each other using AI to maximize rent. They are raising rents by as much as 30% in some markets. They also being non-local landlords, are not doing required maintenance. In many places they are raising rents evicting or forcing out people only to leave a unit vacant to keep the supply tight and keep rents high. We are quickly moving to monopoly sytle control on the US housing market. Blackrock controls upward of 40% of the US rental stock. I think that is a problem we need to focus on by taxing non-resident landlords to make this type of consolidation more unattractive. They add nothing to local communities. The Atlanta Journal Constitution recently did a long form piece looking at the worst 100 apartment complexes in the Atlanta Metro, and a good number of them were owned by a shell company for a hedge fund in of all places Beverly Hills CA. They had flouted local laws, and not done repairs and it is very hard to go after these people because it isn't very easy to find who actually owns them.
There needs to be a yearly tax that increases year over year by at least 20% on homes that remain uninhabited by regular people (not owned by banks who can afford to buy those homes and have them sit there) because no one can afford them and a law that limits the number of houses an area can have without someone living in them at least 9-10 months out of the year to slow down development of unaffordable housing. That might decrease the demand for builders to build only homes that are too expensive for anyone to afford.
There IS a greed crisis, and we can absolutely solve that by simply giving people housing with no strings attached. If you disagree on this then you simply don't understand the scales of wealth involved. But we still need to *build more* affordable housing; there aren't enough houses being built currently to keep up with demand, and that allows prices to be driven up. There are two forms of artificial scarcity which landlords use to keep the cost of living high and keep homelessness intact: intentional vacancy AND the slow rate at which housing for real people is built. You have to address both (and both can be addressed by nationalizing the industry and fully dissolving all landholding companies, then fixing rent and spending the money to build affordable housing in the correct amounts rather than market-optimal amounts. the gargantuan efficiency losses of capitalism cost FAR too much to allow the problem to be solved with the market dictating housing prices).
In my area, there are a lot of vacancies in apartments, but they're the ones that are like $3000+/month. I also once knew 9 people staying in a 4 bedroom place, and over the last 3-5 years, the housing prices have more than doubled, with houses needing expensive renovations being listed for more than $300K. I even know people who have lived in airbnb places for more than a month because it was cheaper than getting an actual apartment or house. It's ridiculous!
There are big companies like Blackwell that are withholding properties from rent to jack up prices, and the number is significant. Christina Smallhorn just did a video on that in the last month or see o...
Only viable because of the constricted housing supply. If we could just build to demand, you'd poke a hole directly in their investment. Nobody tries to hoard cars to drive up prices.
"we're not asking to be guaranteed a home"
I am!
But the government and society have the right to tell you NO!
A government powerful enough to guarantee you a home is powerful enough to deny you a home.
The people need to build their own modest homes with local materials to break the cycle. Government needs to stay out of the way instead of conspiring with developers and the already comfortable landlords. 3000 square feet of chipboard and drywall and asphalt to provide shelter for a couple humans as relatively small mammals, is absurd.
@@tar170
Pretty much.
How many people claiming we “have enough housing to home the homeless” would let a homeless person live in their vacation home? I’m guessing essentially zero. Easy to be a social justice warrior if you don’t actually have the vacation home.
With young people being especially hard hit (and low income people in general), what happens when an area can no longer gets workers because the people at those incomes are no longer around due to unaffordable housing and unreasonably long commutes that involve a car the workers cannot afford? I can't see how this unaffordable arrangement can endure indefinitely, though it's certainly lasted long enough. Combine that with (at least in the US) the almost total closure of the faucet of immigration (especially low wage immigrants), who's gonna do the work? Isn't agriculture already dealing with this?
Politicians always wanted to maintain the problems of homelessness and that of the housing crises to be used as their voting platform and to use the MOB RULE TACTICS OF A DEMOCRACY THAT SACRIFICES THE RULE OF LAW OF A REPUBLIC!
It’s greed that created the 15 million vacancies.
We definitely need built (a lot lot lot) more housing but it is definitely a greed crisis as well!
What does that mean? Unless greed is the NIMBYs in which case I agree.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 It is the NIMBYs to some extent. But it also seems like all that's being built is upper-class appartments and hardly any affordable housing.
Sure, one could argue that, at one point we might have built so much housing that the supply eventually outruns the demand to such an extent that prices finally drop. But I don't think that's ever going to happen, at least not in large cities, because those companies investing in the construction of new real estate can also read statistics. They would be stupid to build so much as to run into deminishing returns.
@@lonestarr1490 Yes, but as developers build more housing they cause land prices to fall. This effects the investors who buy housing, but the developers themselves then get access to lower cost land to build on, so they have no incentive to stop.
Also, I don't think luxury housing is such an issue. For one, new housing has always been latest and greatest, secondly, a lot of it isn't really luxury, it's just marketed as such. And third, people with incomes need houses to, and (with a few exceptions like billionaires row) these are investment properties they are residences.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 _"Yes, but as developers build more housing they cause land prices to fall."_
How so?
@@lonestarr1490 real estate values are driven by 2 things, the physical building, and the land it sits on. The value of that land is based on the positive externalities of an area (natural endowments, local infrastructure, density of people). But the price of land is based on scarcity. Which is why cities like SF have such high prices for a house half the size you might get in st. lewis. reducing the shortages pushes this price down. That doesn't hurt realestate developers though, since they don't generally hold the building after construction..
I grew up with the military. Military has barracks for solders. They don't need to leave their home vacant. The military should do more to help them sell it, or allow more time to sell. What do you want to bet it's vacant because they either think the value will go up while they're gone, or they've asked someone to put it up for rent for an exorbitant price, with their stuff still in it, and they intend to kick the renter out when they get back?
All still problems fixed with decommodification of housing. But for that, Revolution.
I can hear the battle cry now "Is it empty? BURN IT DOWN!!!"
California has the highest number of "vacant homes" and is always brought up.
So glad you made this video explaining this. There were people posting this exact argument in the comments section of one of your previous videos.
I didn't have an exact explanation to offer them but I knew it was much more nuanced than what they were saying. They made it sound like most vacant units are all airbnb's which I know is not the case.
This is one more reason why I'm a firm believer that the more government interferes in the housing market the higher prices are driven up. This is most often due to things like rent control exacerbating existing housing stock by reducing incentive for more housing to be built.
I think one of the fundamental things that people who advocate for socialist housing policy fail to consider are incentives and the role they play in supply. If you fail to understand how to incentivize more housing to be built then you will never address the supply side of the problem.
California refugee here, from San Diego county, a lot of the homeless do NOT want to change their circumstances because they would have to give up drugs, or they would not make as much as they do from standing on the corner.
So many good points, great video!
While I think this video brought good points about the nature of the vacant homes around the united states being and how not including housing insequirity overall into the discussion is problamatic, it simply does not address the "greed is the core problem". How many homes/ apartments are being used up as airbnbs by massive companies buying up real estate for the sole purpose of furnishing for airbnb? How many properties are bought by large renter coorporations, sucking up housing space in the community and forcing locals to rent at higher costs rather than just buying the place (ultimately causing the housing insecurity mentioned at the end of the video)? To take this argument a step further, how many hotels in the major metropolitan areas are empty right now? How many office buildings in those same areas are empty right now due to the overall shift towards work from home? This video hits it on the dot at the end that this is a policy failure on a federal, state, county, and city level. Ultimately, the interests of coorporations with large amounts of capital are placed over the people. The greed of these corporate entities is causing literally millions to suffer. This is absolutely wild in such a wealthy country like America.