We let them sit empty instead of making the logical decision to use them and help fix our housing shortage.
That’s not up to “us,” it’s up to homeowners. We can’t just snap our fingers and have all available housing available for use by homeless people, the owners wouldn’t be okay with that.
The closest we can get is to increase property taxes, which would discourage people from having second (or more) properties.
But like the statistics show, that isn’t the issue here. Housing vacancies are down, almost to record lows, which means there’s a supply problem. We can discuss what kind of supply we need (SFH vs multi-family), but the vacancy rate isn’t the problem here. We need more housing, and we need better social programs to help w/ homeless people, we don’t need to hit a 0% vacancy rate though.
We value people’s ability to make money off of human needs more than other people’s ability to obtain human needs, it’s as simple as that.
We perpetuate an immoral and unethical society so greedy people can indulge in greed. I’m sorry it doesn’t sicken you like it should, we’ve been trained to accept this unethical system.
Whether it sickens me is irrelevant. I’m talking about the facts of the situation, which don’t support the implication that we could solve homelessness by using vacant properties.
We should work toward solving homelessness, but vacant properties aren’t relevant to those solutions.
17 homes for every homeless person in the country.
We let them sit empty instead of making the logical decision to use them and help fix our housing shortage.
This will never get better until it is illegal for corporations to own homes
That’s not up to “us,” it’s up to homeowners. We can’t just snap our fingers and have all available housing available for use by homeless people, the owners wouldn’t be okay with that.
The closest we can get is to increase property taxes, which would discourage people from having second (or more) properties.
But like the statistics show, that isn’t the issue here. Housing vacancies are down, almost to record lows, which means there’s a supply problem. We can discuss what kind of supply we need (SFH vs multi-family), but the vacancy rate isn’t the problem here. We need more housing, and we need better social programs to help w/ homeless people, we don’t need to hit a 0% vacancy rate though.
We value people’s ability to make money off of human needs more than other people’s ability to obtain human needs, it’s as simple as that.
We perpetuate an immoral and unethical society so greedy people can indulge in greed. I’m sorry it doesn’t sicken you like it should, we’ve been trained to accept this unethical system.
Whether it sickens me is irrelevant. I’m talking about the facts of the situation, which don’t support the implication that we could solve homelessness by using vacant properties.
We should work toward solving homelessness, but vacant properties aren’t relevant to those solutions.