Joanne Erickson’s story shows the looming challenges for millions of seniors struggling with health issues, an unforgiving housing market and little or no retirement savings.
In some remote places yes, and there are a small number of ultra expensive mansions that sit as 5th+ properties but by and large there is not enough housing for everyone.
The vacant houses additionally include ones that are condemned, ones that have been sold but haven’t been moved into yet, and ones that have been moved out of, are on market, but haven’t sold.
Realistically you need about 5% of houses to be vacant at any given time to have enough stock open for people to just move around like normal. Anything less than that is a shortage.
Many American cities are sitting below 2% vacancy - which is an extreme shortage. NYC sits at 1.41%.
There are no answers to the homelessness crisis besides building housing. A lot of it.
You are talking about unowned and unadvertised housing. A new trend in the housing market has been people buying houses and putting them on air bnb while they wait for the value to appreciate. Several houses in my neighborhood did that.
That alone has taken a huge number of units off the market.
But then on top of that, there’s been rent collusion with apps like yield star which has ballooned the cost of housing to unreasonable levels. Landlords have let units sit empty because they know following the yield star recommendations will ultimately maximize their profits.
Building housing helps, but so long as these factors exist no level of new housing can compete. We’d have to more than double the empty units to make a dent in the pricing from these speculative owners. Even that might be too much.
A similar phenomenon has happened in China. There are literally giant “ghost cities” because real estate is a speculative market.
Are there really unoccupied empty houses standing around all over the country?
Not really, no.
In some remote places yes, and there are a small number of ultra expensive mansions that sit as 5th+ properties but by and large there is not enough housing for everyone.
The vacant houses additionally include ones that are condemned, ones that have been sold but haven’t been moved into yet, and ones that have been moved out of, are on market, but haven’t sold.
Realistically you need about 5% of houses to be vacant at any given time to have enough stock open for people to just move around like normal. Anything less than that is a shortage.
Many American cities are sitting below 2% vacancy - which is an extreme shortage. NYC sits at 1.41%.
There are no answers to the homelessness crisis besides building housing. A lot of it.
You are talking about unowned and unadvertised housing. A new trend in the housing market has been people buying houses and putting them on air bnb while they wait for the value to appreciate. Several houses in my neighborhood did that.
That alone has taken a huge number of units off the market.
But then on top of that, there’s been rent collusion with apps like yield star which has ballooned the cost of housing to unreasonable levels. Landlords have let units sit empty because they know following the yield star recommendations will ultimately maximize their profits.
Building housing helps, but so long as these factors exist no level of new housing can compete. We’d have to more than double the empty units to make a dent in the pricing from these speculative owners. Even that might be too much.
A similar phenomenon has happened in China. There are literally giant “ghost cities” because real estate is a speculative market.