this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
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First: there are roughly 700,000 homeless people at any one time in the US, according to HUD. If there are 16M vacant homes, that's more like 23 per homeless person. So the math is a bit off.
Second: I see a lot of vacant homes in my area. Most of the should be condemned and bulldozed. There's one I drive by every day on my way to work that's covered with kudzu. I remember seeing the coroner there about two and a half years ago, and the house has just sat there since. My guess is that it's locked in probate, there were no heirs that could be located, or something like that, and so there's nothing that can be done with it until it's seized by the county and auctioned off to pay the tax debt on the property (that's usually about ten years or so in my area). I would lay a sizeable wager on many of the 16M vacant homes being claimed being properties like that; places that are houses in name, but not suitable to live in.
I bet someone who has no where to live would still happily live there over nowhere
Okay, and someone that's starving would rather dumpster dive. But we shouldn't be feeding starving people out of a dumpster, just because they'll take it over nothing.
Also, FWIW, I'm pretty far away from a large metro area, and about 20 miles outside of a two traffic light town. Living in any of these abandoned homes would make it very challenging for an unhoused person to find a job, or even get to a grocery store.
A couple percent of the housing market is also going to always be vacant due to turnover as well. That accounts for a large portion, if not the majority of that 16M.