Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly

There are 16 million vacant houses--28 for every homeless person.

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.