No…. The immigrants stole them all
This article claims a lot of these are foreclosures and banks don’t want to be landlords
As other two have said. The carrying costs for banks is just too low to incentivize liquidity in housing supply. Put them on the market and watch home prices and rent fall
landlords
the easy way to solve this is TO GIVE THE DAMNED HOUSES AWAY instead of retaining ownership of property that could house people. don’t want to be landlords? give it the fuck away
Corollary: this is also why we have squatters rights.
throughout the US?
if so, they don’t seem to be used successfully that I see; really the only squatters I’ve encountered were the pack of meth heads who moved into a neighbors house while they were working overseas. claimed they had a lease, even. And even they were gone in under a week.
just curious, thanks.
throughout the US?
Well The US is a patchwork of laws, so mileage may vary.
Still, perhaps we need to strengthen them. They are in the spirit of “this is who actually lives and contributes here”
it’s it a solution or more that they’re are abandoned areas with empty houses in places with no jobs or investments which aren’t for for a community?
LAND VALUE TAX
Isn’t this property tax? Which I believe every state has. There should probably be a larger homestead discount though. It’s nothing where I live.
it’s a tax on land.
not a tax on property or improvements on the land.
often the idea being you incentivize development because the developed land is taxed at the same or lower rate than undeveloped land.
a conventional property tax taxes the land and the improvements equally. this often disincentivized development because developing the land means paying more taxes.
But doesn’t development increase the land value as well? In high demand places the land value is the significant factor in the property anyways.
Development of surrounding land increases land value yes, but the idea is that since the landowner didn’t do that development themselves, they shouldn’t be able to profit from it through increased value of their own land. “Land value” is kind of an amorphous though, another way to think about it is that we want to incentivize the most economically optimal use of land in high demand areas, thus we should tax all land proportional to demand (measured via price) to encourage those landowners who have undeveloped or under-utilized land relative to demand to use it.
(note this is counter-intuitively pro-environmental because it applies most to land with high demand, e.g. cities, not forest or farmland, and if cities can be successfully densified to satisfy housing demand, pressure to sprawl can be reduced, increasing those lands left to nature)
Ok so the idea is we want high density land development to be cheaper relative to low density land development to encourage urban living?
It’s still unclear to me why land value tax vs property tax is different in this scenario.
If the land surrounding an underdeveloped parcel rises in value, so too does the property tax. Do you mean that we should decrease the tax on improvements? I think this can be done with taxation based on things like number of tenants or businesses (less tax for more density). Otherwise you just end up with lower density luxury condos everywhere.
And by economically optimal, do you mean optimal for the most people or for the most profit? These often differ.
The other people didn’t mention it, but this comes from the economic school called Georgism. If you want to know more that keyword should help you out.
Legally disallow speculation on human needs.
I feel like this is already possible through homestead exemptions. You can even extend this to higher density rental complexes (more incentive for an apartment complex to be fully occupied). Unfortunately this exemption is tiny in some places.
How many of these are actually habitable? I would assume a large portion are either too dilapidated or under renovations.
I very much doubt that nearly a third of the housing stock is vacant for no reason, especially when it’s a seller’s market. The statistics for people who own more than home or buildings with more than unit are not enough to explain the difference. I’m skeptical of these random no name authors on websites like medium.
I know people here want a sexy quick solution, but the reality is that this country’s housing stock is too small, too old, and is not keeping up with demand at all. The one and only solution is to reform zoning laws, expedite housing construction, and pump the market with so many new units that it not only meets demands, but exceeds to the point where prices fall and we have a buyer’s market.
I run a condo building and there’s about half a dozen apartments in the building that have been sitting vacant for as long as I’ve been here for about 5 years now. The owners don’t even live in the country. Just apartments sitting there unused for years
they are an investment.
here in boston, chinese people buy up apartments for their children to go to college, years ahead of time. several vacant buildings near my own place. even if their kid doesn’t go to school here, it’s still an asset that appreciates. chinese landlord that lives half a globe away doesn’t care about renting it out either. it’s just a place to park their money.
I think you should be a resident with records of living in the country before being allowed to buy. Letting the Chinese wealthy buy up all our land is stupid and short sighted
As long as we refuse to decouple housing from a tool of speculation, we will not address affordable housing.
most people’s wealth is tied up in housing. so if you decouple that you will make most americans much poorer
I think it’s fine to use it as a speculation tool if you are living there. If not, then it should be a massive tax liability. Pressure people buying empty homes to either rent them to someone for cheap, live in them, or sell them.
this is precisely what NIMBYism is. People living in their own homes, who want to force up the value by preventing new homes from being constructed.
it’s also the reason for the crisis. without that attitude and all the zoning restrictions, our housing market would be much more cheap and flexible. but when you have towns that only permit like 50 new houses a a year, and the population is growing at 3x that, you have a serious problem
I think the concept of a tax penalty with some relief for having a tenant that isn’t being gouged sounds nice.
They should never have been allowed to become gambling chips.
Noone should be allowed to purchase a home without agreeing to live in it full time for at least a year afterwards. Split it into a duplex to become a landlord? Another year. Wanna be a landlord? You must live in that building full time along with your tenants. Outrageous? Not nearly as outrageous as homelessness because of the prices.
You shouldn’t be allowed to own residential property you don’t live on. There needs to be a way for people to move so after 3 months of owning a property that is not your primary residence taxes go through the roof and double every year.
“What about renters?”
Basement suites / duplexes exist. An apartment building will be better taken care of when the owner has to also live in the apartment building.it’s called a vacancy tax.
landlords already get tax discounts for living in properties they rent out in most communities.
Now those homes slowly rot and lose value and become dangereous to live in.
As a result, rich people can’t run airbnbs. Capitalists are losing in long term for pride/greed/incompetence.
At this rate they will require government subsidies to rebuild them later. All because those selfish low-to-upper middleclass people are refusing 50 year mortgages.
the houses don’t lose value. the land goes up faster in value than the deprecation on the physical house.
the price of the land is what matters way more than the house on it.
To an extent. But I can buy a house for like 25% of the typical cost around here for a 1986 property versus a recent build, even with comparable location and land area.
Varies by locale, in LA the value of structures are likely a rounding error, in the middle of nowhere, the structure is nearly everything.
yes, but most of the population lives in urban centers. they don’t live in the middle of no where. and it’s not viable for them to move there.
there are houses 2 hours from my city that cost like 200K. i could easily by them. but I can’t live there because it would mean spending 4-5 hours in a car every day. there are no jobs in those towns. anything that’s an hours drive or less, is closer to a million dollars. which i can’t afford.
The housing market crash, I believe was a lost opportunity. When the US government had to bail out banks, why did it not ask for those houses that went belly up. Could have started a social housing aid, here it could sell luxury homes to buy low cost housing to give to its most vulnerable citizens. It paid for those houses using people’s tax dollars, why not use it for the benefit of the people
because that’s socialism.
the concept of federal public housing was basically made illegal in the 90s by the welfare reform acts.
the federal government can’t do this by law. legally it is not allowed to increase the number of public housing units beyond those that existed in 1998. it’s called the Faircloth amendement.
Bailing out companies is also not capitalism, ideally should have left them then to go bankrupt
Like then at least their assets would have been sold to cover their losses. This way your government is not socialism but it is choosing who are the winners, since they cannot lose
yeah but it’s legal.
I have an idea. Why don’t the empty houses just eat the smaller number of homeless people?
The problem is many of them can’t manage themselves never mind a home. Sticking them in a house and walking off isn’t doing anyone a favor. How would they even pay for utilities, upkeep, and property taxes? We can’t afford to subsidize everything, many of us are struggling to get by ourselves. They’d need jobs to sustain themselves and I doubt many of them could hold a job or qualify for much. Also this just lumps every house in the US into a single category. If you are in CA and refuse to move to Detroit then it doesn’t matter how many available homes there are in Detroit.
Jesus. I remember the figure being like, 10. Which was already absurd.
I think if you consider is as a percentage of all homes, the number doesnt look as insane. There’s about 133m homes and 17m are vacant according to the article which is roughly 13% of homes are empty.
I’m not sure what the average vacancy rate is in other countries is so not sure how bad 13% is but it doesnt sound as crazy as 27x.
Update: According to this article the US does rank pretty high in vacant properties. Im actually surprised Japan is 1st.
https://realestatemagazine.ca/canada-ranks-11th-for-the-highest-proportion-of-empty-homes/
One of my doomsday fantasies is to simply take one of the empty homes I see whenever I commute to work, since the fall of the government would probably make it hard for them to enforce the law. I’ve even worked out multiple options, it’s amazing how many mansions are simply empty because the right seller hasn’t come along to pay 30M for it or because it’s a summer home. Easily one half, I’ve counted.
You can even try now, but there is a ton of private security lately so you would need to wait until the fall of the empire first, I bet. Plus hey, it’s mountain side property so you’ll have the high ground in combat!
Plus probably solar or a generator, so you could keep that infinity pool warm.
Hell yeah, infinity pool / basic survival generator when the power plants are all derelict. But I’ll probably need to add an engineer to my post apocalypse stronghold to keep it maintained.
I thought we were told to call them, “unhoused”. Did I miss something?
Because quibbling over labels is how to restore their dignity
Well, they’re not really “for” them…/s
Well, no, often. Take a 30-year mortgage at 5% on a $120K house with a $20K downpayment. Now figure out what the bank earns off that $100K over 30 years. Banks love mortgages.
