Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.
If we had any sense, there would be crazy high taxes on unoccupied housing. There could be short term exceptions for things like remodeling and finding tenants. But it should be prohibitively expensive to sit on empty houses and apartments while people struggle to find affordable housing.
Take it a step further - decommodify all housing.
There is no valid reason why a handful of people should be allowed to own more than they could ever use, specifically so they can use the surplus to extort massive profits from others just trying to survive.
Housing is a human right, it’s time we demand it be treated as such.
I like the idea and I’ve advocated for it in the past. There’s one problem though- what about people who need to rent? Someone needs to own that property.
That is a manufactured problem.
How do you deal with it for now?
Social housing.
Government owned is the best we can do (and it has been done relatively successfully in the past) but just like all other housing, it has ended up being commodified for profit, because our governments are capitalist, and will always prioritise profit over anything else, which is why it’d only ever be a superficial solution.
In the long run?
Abolish capitalism and its artificial scarcity and commodification of all human rights (not only housing but food, water, healthcare…).
I’m an anarchist, in the future I want there is no money, so renting isn’t a thing, people have their own homes, and I suppose there will be communal property that would act as housing for people who for whatever reason aren’t there for the long term, and who would contribute whatever they were able to the maintenance and upkeep of the residence and/or community, but there really should be no need for anyone to “rent”, because no one will “own”, and permanent secure and stable housing wouldn’t be out of anyone’s reach.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
How do you make sure there are enough houses though.
Capitalism solves that problem, albeit imperfectly, by making housebuilding profitable when there is a supply shortage (home building has gone up as prices have shot up in the US.)
A command-style economy (government owned) solves that problem more directly by directing resources to build more homes.
I don’t see how anarchism solves this problem at all. Say you have an anarchist society where there isn’t enough housing, due to population growth or natural disaster or whatever. What mechanism is there to build houses for the homeless? Sure, they can try to build something their selves, but good luck making anything more complex than a lean-to without professional help. You can ask nicely for someone to build one for you I guess… that’s really more communism than anarchism though, and it doesn’t have a great track record of working on a scale larger than a few hundred people who all signed up to live in a community together.
Capitalism solves that problem, albeit imperfectly, by making housebuilding profitable when there is a supply shortage (home building has gone up as prices have shot up in the US.)
Lmmfao, how’s that been working out for you? And how about everyone else around you?
I don’t see how anarchism solves this problem at all
Ah, well, if you, a single individual so deeply indoctrinated by capitalism that they look around and think it’s offering them solutions (ignoring the fact that it also created the problem in the first place), and who clearly wilfully knows nothing about anarchism (or communism, for that matter), says it can’t solve this problem, they must be right… 🙄🙄😂
All right boss, explain to me how anarchism ensures housing for all. I’m all ears.
You could have answered them instead of just being degrading. Not really selling the ideal in the followup. So I guess I’ll try: Its anarchy, so there is no government. Some communal apparatus would probably appear that works on the construction of houses. What’s the incentive? Well we’re already living in a community where giving back to it operates in the place of money. So they’d just build houses, cause thats what they do.
The amish solved this hundreds of years ago without capitalism or communism
Yes- a small community of like minded people. But they still rely on state services and law enforcement.
“state services” are just people’s actions, communities of people can cooperate without rulers.
This is a common misunderstanding of anarchism. Anarchism doesn’t mean individualism, often it means the opposite. Anarchists can cooperate and freely associate into large organisations of people and can participate in planned economies or even market economies (less commonly).
Edit: I don’t expect you to read all of this, but I’d have similar expectations about anything I can say on the subject, and this saves me time.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
All right, I made it through about 20% of that document before I decided to call it quits. I appreciated the examples of different anarchic/stateless societies but I got frustrated with the use of obviously untrue statements to support the thesis.
In the introduction the doc states that statist societies are incapable of dealing with problems like climate change. This seems completely backwards to me. Climate change is a tragedy of the commons type challenge and that requires some sort of authority to deal with. Do you really think a world of anarchist societies could pull off the Montreal Protocol?
Here’s another claim that’s clearly untrue:
“Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.”
- institutional racism has been “reformed away” in pretty much every developed nation on the planet. That is not to say that racism is gone but enormous progress has already been made. Not a decade goes by without enormous progress towards equality. A century ago women couldn’t vote; 2 decades ago gay people couldn’t marry. It seems strange to look at this societal progress and throw up your hands and say this system is incapable of achieving equality.
Another claim is “everyone also has a sense of the needs of those around them, and we are all capable of generous and selfless actions.” I’m a big believer that humans are fundamentally good, but there are absolutely exceptions. Quite apart from societal influences, some people are neurodivergent a threat to people around them. Its the few that ruin it for the many.
When talking about indigenous societies run by cheif, the document claims “Ultimately they [cheifs] worked harder and had less personal wealth than others” with no citation. I have never myself read any examples of this. Every portrayal of cheifs I have ever seen shows them as having the nicest clothes, the nicest lodging, and usually the first pick of one or more wives. And before you dismiss that as western propaganda- western propaganda generally kinda like the strength and dignity cheifs. I don’t see why they would make up facts about chieftains that make them look better- surely they would instead push the opposite narrative that indigenous cheifs were poor and overworked?
Then I got to the discussion of KPAM which was the last straw for me. The doc describes it as a place where “large populations had freed themselves from the authority of landlords and governors and reasserted their power to come to collective decisions, to organize their day-to-day life, pursue their dreams, and defend those dreams from invading armies.”
I was curious about such a large example of anarchy so I did some more research. Wikipedia says “Before long, the association found itself under attack by both Korean communists and Japanese imperialists, who assassinated their leadership” hmmmm that doesn’t sound like it anarchy…
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l3czli/did_an_anarchist_commune_really_exist_in_the/
Seems KPAM was basically just the domain of a general/warlord Kim Chwa-chin.
I was interested to learn more about different examples but the document burned through its credibility with me and I couldn’t take any of its claims at face value.
I must say I’m impressed at your level of engagement and I admire how much thought you’ve put into this, I truly did not expect it, and although I don’t agree with all of your criticisms completely I do agree that it’s a biased presentation and I don’t take all of its information at face value either.
I’ve dug into some of its claims as I read it, and some things were truer than I expected and others were interpretations of the truth, but I never found anything that made me feel the author was being dishonest with the reader on purpose. Though some things lack adequate justification or are matters of opinion stated more assertively than they should be, I don’t think the author is trying to lie to me anymore than you could say they are lying to themselves.
I consider it a very interesting and eye opening resource with many reality-rooted ideas of how things could work and how they have worked, but to your point it’s not convincing enough that this is the right way or the only way. However, my goal in sharing it wasn’t to convince you of all of that but instead to try to give you a better idea of how anarchism might work at scale and dispel the notion that an anarchist society would not be capable of providing basic needs for its people, I hope you can see how that could be possible even if you reject some of the more modern and larger scale examples as “not really anarchism.” There are other contemporary “not really anarchism” areas like the region of the Zapatistas and Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan that are of interest to me as well.
I disagree with some of your criticisms, for instance although I can recognize that civil rights have been progressing over the decades under Liberalism I can point to very many examples of backsliding and ongoing systemic issues that are just as harmful to marginalized people of today as they were when the mask was off. Through a certain lens you might think that we have more black slaves today under the legalized slavery of the prison labor system in the United States than we did under the slave trade, but granted that’s “more equal” in that it’s not limited to black people and it’s also a function of population growth.
Any concessions towards equality from the ruling class have these kinds of asterisks and those rights vanish as quickly as they appear under a system of rule. I agree with the author that the only truly equal society that’s possible would be one that actively resists any form of oppression (including economic oppression) and violence-backed authority and by definition that begins to take the shape of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Just as you point to KPAM and say its characteristics were a result of benevolent (debatable perhaps) rule by a warlord, I feel the same about any egalitarian progress today under Liberal capitalism, and that power apparatus is a short distance away from becoming fascist and undoing all of that progress. That used to feel like hyperbole, but feels all too real now.
Thank you for the engaging conversation. I don’t think we disagree as much as I thought we might, nor do we completely agree, but I’m glad we had an open minded conversation. I’m not a devout and completely convinced anarchist but I’m definitely an anti-capitalist and anarchism feels like a good target to push towards from our current state, maybe along the way we’ll find a better stopping point or a point of diminishing returns, but that’s the direction I would like to see us taking from here.
The person who lives in it should own it. Just give it to them for free.
why would anyone want to work horrible jobs with horrible working conditions if their needs are met? that would mean employers would need to treat their employees with respect and all working arrangements would need to be mutually beneficial instead of one side consenting under duress.
Owner has to live on the property. If you want to rent out the basement or build a suite no problem, you are adding to the number of places available to live.
No one is stopping Grandma Susan from renting out her basement to pay bills. This is about commercial landlords.
No one is stopping Grandma Susan from renting out her basement to pay bills.
I regret to report that plenty of people are stopping Grandma Susan from doing just that. Many municipalities in the U.S. forbid unrelated people from living in the same household to prevent roommate arrangements, and they also outlaw accessory dwelling units like basement apartments. American zoning laws are a nightmare.
Many municipalities in the U.S. forbid unrelated people from living in the same household to prevent roommate arrangements
citation requested.
My own city only recently lifted a regulation like that:
The specifics will change depending on the locality, of course, but these regulations are fairly common.
from the article you posted:
In more than a third of the city, the existing zoning restrictions prohibited any more than two unrelated tenants from living together in homes not occupied by the owner.
so two unrelated people can live together fine. And this only applies to that third of the city, the remaining 2/3rds do not have this restriction.
I know it’s less than the ideal, which would be them minding their own fucking business, but the statement I replied to is inaccurate - in your case, grandma could rent out her basement, she just can’t rent out the guest room, basement and MIL shack out back, IF she’s in that one third of Madison covered by that reg.
IF__*
Please explain to me why somebody needs to own the property. Bear in mind that a lot of property in the country and the world is not owned by somebody.
I have a family member that has empty houses. It’s immoral, and severely fucked up. He doesn’t give a shit and thinks he’s earned the right. He treats them like stocks so far as I can tell.
Important note here: the US homeless count is woefully inadequate to actually get a realistic number. They use the PIT count, which is a
count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons carried out on one night in the last 10 calendar days of January or at such other time as required by HUD.
So if you’re unsheltered and not spotted, or manage to sleep with a friend because it’s fucking freezing, or your shelter is not official, or maybe you’re homeless from March to Oktober, or any of a hundred other reasons, you’re not getting counted.
The actual problem is MUCH bigger than the official numbers make it look.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still way more empty homes than homeless, just that there are more homeless.
Is the problem 30x worse than it looks? Cus, it’d still be covered then…
Not to mention that there are homeless couples and families that would share a house.
I fucking hope not.
But but but these houses don’t have… Batman slaps Robin It’s not sleeping in the elements and it’s an address to put on a job application.
What really boggles my mind is how many mosty vacant “vacation” homes people have here in Florida. You can drive along some coasts or barrier islands, and most of the big houses along there are totally vacant for a large part of the year.
Not to speak of how they are in a prime spot for being trashed by a hurricane, and taking up space for what could be a public beach or park.
Forget ethics and all that. Just economically, it seems incredibly inefficient. It’s like building five star hotels along volcano rims, then leaving them mostly empty.
And research shows it would be cheaper to give each of them a house… Instead of spending on programs that don’t work
I’m as leftist as they come and yes I could Google it myself but I wonder if you have specific examples of research that you’ve seen that you’d be willing to find again and share
I’ve found some here:
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions
There are 126M homes in the US. The average American moves 11 times per life, or maybe once every 8 years. That means 1/8 of homes, or 15.75M homes, might be “vacant” just to support people shuffling around. That’s not real vacancy.
I realize I pulled these numbers from my butt, but so did the original image. Either way, it hopefully shows that we need way more houses built in areas people can live, and it’s not as simple as sticking homeless in existing housing.
Yes, and
- second homes of rich people
- Airbnbs which probably have a higher natural vacancy
- damaged and unfit housing
- useless houses in the bumfuck nowhere
You may disagree with some of these existing (especially 1), but still vacant =/= homeless people can or want to move in tomorrow
damaged and unfit housing
This one can not be overstated. I drive past many of these on my way to work every day. Many of them are damaged and unfit because someone died, and no one wants to move out to bumfuck nowhere, even if the house is cheap. So they just rot. Even when I lived in Chicago, there were always houses that had just been allowed to fall apart through lack of maintenance, houses that had become too expensive to either repair, or demolish and re-build.
useless houses in the bumfuck nowhere
I would like to contribute that this covers all of suburbia, from a logistical standpoint. None of that is walking distance to, well, anything. So our homeless person trying to get on their feet will also need a car and insurance, or a whole heap of bus passes (assuming the bus even goes there).
Before I bought my home I had to move every single year, if not more, depending on the whims of the property owner. I was over a dozen moves as an adult by 30.
The average American moves 11 times per life, or maybe once every 8 years. That means 1/8 of homes, or 15.75M homes, might be “vacant” just to support people shuffling around
That assumes it takes a full year after buying the property to fully move into it. If we cut that number in half ( 1/16 of homes, or 7.87M homes) that provides more than enough homes for the homeless population and assumes 6 months for people to move which is still absurdly long.
abandon capitalism, adopt resource based communities
I love how the verdict is FALSE, then goes on to explain that the problem is MUCH bigger than the post implied LMAOOOO
If it went to 1 homeless person and 1million homes, would that be worse or better?
Uhhhh, sure? Maybe try to figure out a way to stop asking such stupid questions. It isn’t some existential problem. Like this very post points out, we have the resources to end homelessness. We simply don’t. We are evil. We want money.
Alright, question. If market prices are supposedly driven by supply-and-demand, and the supply is nearly 30 times the demand, why are housing prices so fucking high?
Because a house today is worth less than a house years from now (probably). Housing is seen as an investment instead of a human need, so you can hold a bunch of them like tickets in the hopes that you can sell them for more later.
As long as banks keep printing money (which then becomes public debt), housing values will continue to rise along with all other financial assets.
The same reason groceries are.
Greed
Demand includes every person currently housed as well and only a small portion of the population is homeless, so the supply really isn’t 30 times higher than the demand.
30 times demand
That’s not what this is saying.
This says there’s ~650K homeless, let’s round up to a million.
Round the post number up to 30, and we get 30 Million empty houses.
This says 15 million in 2022, so the post isn’t off by much, given were talking different years.
That said, the second link I posted says 15M homes is ~ 10% of the US housing inventory, and of that 10%, only ~0.7% was homeowner inventory, which means the rest is rentals.
So there’s your answer: Landlords.
(Also, homeless people usually don’t have the income to afford a rental, let alone buy a house, so they don’t affect the demand curve, which is your second answer: Landlords don’t give a fuck about the homeless)
Stats like that ignore the fact that they are polling “empty homes” nationally, but the homeless population is majority in densely populated cities, not where those empty homes are. So even if they were given these homes for free, they’d have to be relocated, too.
That’s another condemnation of allowing only the market to decide where we build housing. A socialist government would build houses where people need houses.
In my experience, the vacant housing is not built without demand, it’s that the demand vanishes.
There were two trailers where they would have been scrapped, but some relatives took then over and kind of refurbished them, and one of those is now home to another relative that would have been homeless otherwise, and the other is a “hobby” trailer until someone else needs it.
Another is a house where the man died and the wife moved to a small apartment because she felt like she needed to be in the city near a hospital, but no one wants the house because the area is the middle of nowhere.
Rural areas tend to have a fair amount of “nobody wants them anymore” housing laying vacant, but they all, at one point, were being used as housing.
And… Float them in the air? Homeless in metro areas may not have started there, but that’s where a sizeable portion are now and it’s not like there’s abundant space for housing.
People need houses but we need stores and office buildings and other things too.
There’s plenty of room; we just build nothing but luxury housing. And there’s an over-abundance of parking lots because of land speculation. Our land is not being used efficiently at all.
Are you finding homeless people somewhere I’m not? The downtown metro areas are where there is a) not other housing by and large, and b) not space for anything else anyway. Maybe we are talking past each other.
I’m in downtown Los Angeles. We have lots of homeless people, vacant housing, and wasted space like paved parking lots. Where are you?
Midwest, below Chicago burbs. We have in my area way way way more housing demand than supply and houses sell before market or within hours. We have some here and there homelessness but it’s never as bad as streets of downtown Chicago, where parking spaces cost as much as houses.
Most office jobs are done as or more efficiently by workers at home so we should downsize office real estate. This frees up a lot of space for affordable housing and encourages office workers to stay in their suburban communities, thus reducing congestion.
Whole hearted agree. Happy my company is 100% remote.
Have you ever thought that the houses don’t need to be in big cities? Why is that not an option in your mind? Other states bussed them out, they can pay to bus them back in and give them homes.
Why would you advocate for keeping displaced people displaced?
it’s insane how people cannot imagine a way to make decisions that’s not profit driven. people’s minds are so poisoned by capitalism. If we’re around in 100 years, people will judge us like they judge any superstitious culture from the past. We sacrifice our own to the “profit motive” to appease “the market”
Oh don’t worry, the end of the world’s probably coming around 2045 with the start of the post-oil dark ages
Did you read the person I replied to? You can’t house then where they are with socialism or marxism or Harry potter magic. Sure, yes, move them, that’s sane. But no you can’t just snap your fingers to generate housing in places with no footprint to build in.
Why are you hung up on the literal square footage of where these people currently sleep on the streets?
People commute with public transit across great distances.
But yes, downtown areas can be densified. Did we hit the limits of engineering? As far as I can tell we can still build tall buildings.
Holy shit bro, just think.
There’s no reason to reply to you at all if you can’t read dude. This starts with “we can’t house then where they are because capitalism” but this is the fucking point. You can’t house then where they are no matter, literally because of square footage. Public transit and house. Calm your tits and learn to read.
No I mean it lets build houses under bridges and in parks
This is your sincere and well thought out position? You think the homeless population in each downtown area is so large that there’s not enough real estate to house them?
You can just say you don’t care about housing them, this is a safe space
And you can just say that you are not listening because you believe your position is the most moral one.
This guy’s point is that it doesn’t matter what government is running things. There will always be some desirable areas where demand is larger than supply. You haven’t proposed any details besides “a socialist government would solve it”.
Post your specific proposals or stop posturing.
You might want to sit down, it’s complicated.
500 people need houses in an area. Ignore what the market thinks should be done. Build houses or densify housing in that area.
Do you think there are any real world examples where you would need to “float them in the air?”
It’s a stupid argument that’s not on good faith and completely lacks any imagination…
How are houses built now? People speculatively buy land and build on them. Instead of market speculation telling people where to build, people tell people where to build.
Planned economies aren’t a novel or theoretical concept.
TL;DR use your brain
Do you think there are any real world examples where you would need to “float them in the air?”
Yes, in cities. We were talking about downtown areas. Not anywhere that has land available. So any housing project will be more complicated than “build houses”.
You obviously think you are more moral than everyone else, but you’ve provided no interesting solutions. so there’s no use talking to you.
On a more serious note i wonder why you think people that are currently unhoused couldn’t take public transit?
Do you ever have any ideas? What’s it like not being able to reason?
deleted by creator
“planned economies”
My dude you can just say you have no idea about economics and leave it at that
ah yes true capitalism is equivalent to economics I’ve forgotten
I also wonder about the state of many vacant homes.
Mmmmm…asbestos flavoring
It would be interesting to see if the housing units and homeless people are in the same place. My money is that there would be enough to house everyone.
Can’t find the chart now. But last census found lots of rural areas in fly-over states have surplus housing.
Like West Virginia had iirc something like 8-10% surplus. Not going to find many people willing to leave cities to move out to West Virginia or Northern Louisiana/Southern Arkansas. People leaving those places are why cities have housing shortages.
Don’t worry. They’ll have a bed and roof when they’re rounded up and put into for-profit slave market prisons. 'Murica.
Looking at the vacancy data:
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
… it seems as though the vast majority of vacant homes are rentals looking for tenants, rather than rich peoples second homes.
Make of that what you will.
the vast majority of vacant homes are rentals looking for tenants, rather than rich peoples second homes.
They’re the same picture.
So who owns these rental homes but is living elsewhere? Perhaps rich people looking to make cash on their second homes while they dont use them?
Landlords are scum.
If you want to rent whom should you rent from?
There should be options other than renting and owning. If you don’t wish to own property there should still be housing available to you, but it doesn’t need to be rented from a landlord, it could be collectively owned (by tenants), municipal ownership, or something else. Relying on people with capital to provide housing while profiting from your need for housing is a broken system.
Sure, why dont you start one and give away your labor to people that dont want to work as much as you?
If you don’t want to participate in a market system why do you not simply die?
Because I dont want to die. If there were no market system how would you get food and survive?
Do you think market economies are the only kind humanity has ever had?
A basement suite isn’t a vacant home when it’s not being rented.
a homeless person could live there and not be homeless anymore
True! What’s your point?
Someone putting a basement suite in their home isn’t removing a purchasable dwelling from the market, it’s adding to the number of available dwellings.
Then who fixes and maintains it?
The homeless guy.
It is tough sometimes. It is not a full-time job.
Oh that is funny. Normal renters dont take care of a unit let alone a person that is homeless. And many problems are out of the ability of almost everyone. Is the homeless person going to replace the HVAC system?
“HR needs you to spot the difference between these two pictures.”
Rentals looking for tenants
Rich peoples second homes
“They’re the same picture.”
And behind Door Number 2, we have:
“There’s not a joblessness crisis, there’s a labor shortage. We offered free pizza on fridays for this unpaid Senior Graphic Designer internship, and we’re still not getting applicants”
Are they homes in the places people want to live? Vacancies in Bumfuck, OK don’t help homeless people in Chicago.
You’re just also saying the “free market” does a poor job of providing for the needs of the people. A socialist government would build homes where they’re needed
Sure. The problem I’m seeing here is how people approach the solution. You can tax the hell out of vacancies everywhere, but it’s not going to help if there are no vacancies in specific cities.
But just carefully, don’t give them a home! Make them work for it! What if you just give them a home and they sell it to buy drug? Or what if they just use drugs in the home.
Man if I was young again, I would buy a home to have lots of sex in it. I mean that’s what we did with our first home. Why wouldn’t a homeless person just use it for drugs…right?
If you give them homes they’ll become dependent on shelter, next they might try jobs
One time I saw a guy who was clearly doing totally fine at a job. I swear, he even smelled good. Imagine if ever kid in town had a job! What would we do? It’s illegal for kids to work, you know! What message are we sending our kids if guys are just given houses and allowed to work at a job!
Wow that number’s gone up I remember when it was 4 vacant houses
