this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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The problem with this is that every market is going to have a certain number of empty homes in it in any given time. Properties are bought and sold, vacated and re-rented, and often in this process they sit vacant for a few months. Properties need to be cleaned or renovated. It doesn't matter how egalitarian the home ownership distribution is. It doesn't matter if you're talking socialized housing. Any housing market will have some large number of vacant units at any given time.
My point is that it's incredibly foolish to just look at the raw numbers of "vacant" homes. Most of those "vacant" homes are only temporarily vacant as part of the churn of the real estate market.
The truth is home construction dropped off a cliff after 2008. The real causes of the housing crisis are due to:
Vacant units are not a significant cause of the high cost of housing. Are units sometimes kept empty because of financial reasons or to avoid the rent dropping in certain saturated markets? Yes. But that behavior cannot be maintained long term. In practice, there isn't some vast supply of vacant housing, in places where people want to live, that can just be handed over to the homeless.
This sounds nice until we see that in the majority of markets that vacant units outnumber the homeless population by a significant factor.
You can again misconstrue my argument and say that people will be shipped off to camps in the middle of fucking nowhere (which is ridiculous) or you can go to this argument which that now there are just not enough homes, which is also fucking bullshit.
Or maybe you can stop licking the boots of landlords and understand that commodified housing is causing this issue.
85,000 vacant units in Seattle vs 17k homeless on any given night, 54,000 using the broadest definition of “homeless”
80,000 vacant units in Michigan vs 33,000 homeless again using the broadest definition
291,000 vacant units in Wisconsin vs 3200-20,000 homeless (again depending on how broadly you define “homeless”)
I challenge you to find a city outside of NYC where the vacancy rate doesn’t grossly outweigh the homeless population. And in NYC case you have the surrounding metro area. “B-b-b-b-but properties are being renovated!” Bullshit. 85,000 properties in Seattle being renovated? Come on. At least some of those are some rich fucks second property that they use sparingly. Restrict that, use it for low income housing, done.