Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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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.
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)