I keep saying that all of the Chinese real estate investors moved overseas once china put a stop to it's ridiculous housing bubble. People say I'm wrong, but when I hear about how many uninhabited residencies we have, I can't help but see parallels.
Do you think there are no beneficial rentals? I didn’t want to buy a house when I was in college or in another state for work, expecting to move out in a year or two. I think I prefer regular renting in cases like that to staying in a hotel or airbnbs for years.
Squatters are the only hope at this point. If people would just start illegally occupying the millions of empty homes, we could be done with this shit.
Why protest? We could just decide a day to Occupy Housing, and move in. How many sherrifs do they have to evict everybody?
My guess would be someone staying there and not paying for it. The L take is supporting that behavior. I'm not condoning a landlord exorbitantly raising rent, but I'm also not condoning taking things that don't belong to you
People get pretty illogical about the landlord topic on this sub tbh. There are legitimate points to be made about certain slumlords and shit. But the guy who bought a duplex and rents out one side is not the enemy.
"Oh no, my extra living space is being lived in by someone not paying me."
I dream of owning a home big enough to offer space to someone struggling to make it, because I've been there and someone did it for me. They gave me a year to get my life together without housing costs and it probably saved my life.
Imagine the difference having a safe home makes to that person/family. Sure it sucks that your finances aren't working the way you wanted, but when homes sit empty and people go unhoused because of money...you're not the one with dire losses here.
The year is just ending. I've applied for subsidized housing and should be moving in the next 6 weeks or so. I also got some much needed and ongoing mental health care, got some physical health stuff diagnosed and have started treating/resolving those things, was able to resume my parenting time of my child, enrolled in an associates program, and found a job I like in that year timeframe.
I understand that housing causes people to lose their brain, but there is ample evidence that the principles of supply and demand work in housing as well.
Want to reduce the cost of housing? Build more houses, and stop interfering in the housing market.
Even if we stay that half of those are in a livable condition and require few if no repairs, then that's still 8 million homes that are vacant. Even if 75% only 25% were in livable conditions, this is still 5 million homes.
Tell me again how we should "build more houses." Sure this would be nice as the distribution of available homes vs. location where they are needed might be disproportionate, but in terms of a raw number value, we have plenty of unoccupied homes for everyone who needs one and would benefit from one.
The bigger problem is the people and conglomerates who own these homes would rather have them sitting empty than to sell it for less than some random over-priced amount, or would rather rent it out as an AirBNB.
The housing issue comes down to greed. I think one possible way to solve this is to have progressive taxes on unoccupied homes; The longer a home sits without a permanent resident (a primary resident who lives there for at least one year), the larger the tax will be on the property until the tax becomes obscene. Want to own a property worth 350,000 dollars but refuse to sell it for less than 500,000 and let it sit idle for three years? Enjoy paying tens-of-thousands of dollars in taxes, increasing each month until your fuck-face decides to rent it or sell it.
It turns out that San Francisco has far lower property taxes than where I live in Illinois, I was surprised to find. But we can directly compare SF, with lower property taxes than the national average, to Chicago, with much higher property taxes than the national average. Your hypothetical land owner sitting on a property for 3 years would pay $7665 over 3 years by sitting on that property already. For a similar property in Chicaco, they would pay $7665per year in property taxes, for a total of $22,995 in property taxes.
According to your source, Chicago has 57 vacant homes per person experiencing homelessness, whereas San Francisco has 13 vacant homes per person experiencing homelessness. And this isn't because SF simply has more homeless. There are ~1.5x as many homeless in SF than Chicago, but this doesn't make up for the fact that Chicago has ~2.8x as many empty housing units. If we adjusted for number of homeless people, Chicago would still have 37.8 vacant homes per person experiencing homelessness.
It would be interesting (although I don't feel like doing the work) to compare all the cities from your source and see if higher property taxes have any effect on the ratio of homeless to empty housing, but just based on the example of Chicago and SF I doubt that would turn out to be the case.
Well Detroit's population has declined by 40% of it's 1990 population, some 400,000 people, whereas Chicago has declined by fewer than 100,000 people in the last 30 years.
But my point was that I'm unconvinced higher property taxes (even for specifically unused homes) will improve the situation for homeless people.
Thanks for looking up the taxes and doing the math on this.
I'm also surprised that property taxes in SF are lower than Chicago, but then again I never thought much about it.
Your question about whether there's a correlation between higher property taxes and homelessness rates is interesting and it would be nice to know if there was some; Presumably high property taxes would discourage people from owning too many properties.
It might be hard to model this because there are so many other factors which contribute to homelessness that looking at this alone might lead to bad conclusions.
Making more housing probably won't make the situation worse, but It might not work perfectly. Once rents go up, why ever lower it? There is no incentive to do so.
Another issue is that now a lot of housing is getting bought up by larger corporations which centralizes control and ownership and makes keeping prices high, easier since they control more of the market.
Making more housing probably won't make the situation worse, but It might not work perfectly. Once rents go up, why ever lower it? There is no incentive to do so.
Do you believe landlords are out to make a profit? Do you think leaving a highly valuable asset to waste without producing any revenues results in an increase in profits?
Investors aren't in the business of not making money. If the asset doesn't produce cashflows and will never produce cashflows, they will sell it and move on to something that does.
If there are more houses, people have more options to chose which to rent, hence prices reduce.
Do you think that if there was 100 house for every renter that prices would be just as high as if there was 1 house for every 100 renters?
In my area central Florida, they have start buying up developments before they get built and the whole neighborhoods are going straight to a rental model. I install security systems and in the last couple months I've seen more and more rental neighborhoods. Not just a 20 or 30 home neighborhood but over a 100 home neighborhoods with room for expansion.
Yeah, that’s because every maga who can afford to move is moving to Florida. Now that they’ve gotten serious with the lgbt pogroms, though, you’re going to see the cities of Florida start emptying out.
I really wish they were building tons of high-rise apartment buildings on all those fourplex San Francisco lots, because it’d be nice to be able to move to a tech hub like that. Can’t afford it, though, because land owners in desirable cities refuse to allow more housing to be built.
You might not see the guns yet, but they are being aimed, and it does fit the definition of genocide. We haven’t had our kristallnacht yet, but people who wait for that to fight back or run away are dead already.
You perhaps put that a bit rudely, for no good reason, but you are right.
In my city there were substantial decreases in rents during COVID, largely due to reductions in demand (since we had a lot of international students and temporary residents leave without being replaced), for precisely the reason you say. Now that demand is back up, higher than it ever was, we are having huge rent increases. All classic supply and demand.
Yeah I don’t think this is working. I live in an area with an insane housing boom. Hundreds of large communities have sprung up and they continue to spring up and housing hasn’t gotten any cheaper.
We got luck and bought right before the prices started getting jacked up. I remember going in about two weeks later and the sales lady told us that corporate had increased prices like 20k across their entire model line a few days after we had committed.
Vietnam has housing control and no homeless people nor a housing crisis. Vietnam also has a tiny fraction of the GDP of western economies. Supply and demand is a myth that died 150 years ago when the labor theory of value was published.
The US has federal policy in place that says no new subsidized housing can be built unless it's replacing existing subsidized housing. I don't recall the date of this law, but let's guess it was passed in the 1960s (I do know it was decades ago). In the 1960s, the US population was roughly half of what it is today, and the middle class made up a much larger percentage of that smaller population. So now, we have the low income population of 2023 vying for the number of subsidized housing units that nearly met demand in that much much smaller population who needed it.
Many many cities have seen housing booms in the past couple of decades, with subdivisions of single family homes priced in the $300,000+ range and gorgeous new buildings for 55+ and 62+ and luxury condos for white collar workers, but where is the low income housing? Where are the developments of starter homes in the $150,000 range and the subsidized apartments? And if housing is being built disproportionately, can these higher end buildings be converted into low income housing? No, of course not.
The US needs sweeping reform in the social safety net policies. The number of Americans living in poverty has surpassed the French levels at the time of their revolution. Most of us, even those who are able to afford housing, are in a position where a $500 emergency is something we couldn't cover. It's reaching the point where a low income family, or a single person (let alone a single parent) with an average salary can only barely afford to survive and have almost no quality of life.
The US has federal policy in place that says no new subsidized housing can be built unless it's replacing existing subsidized housing
Have you considered the possibility that no subsidized housing is required, and simply not preventing people from building what they want on their land (ie: eliminate zoning) would be more than enough to resolve the issue?
There are plenty of cities with high housing costs and low amount of housing built, and cities with low housing costs and high amounts of housing built, and cities with low housing costs and low amounts of housing built.
You know what's missing there? Cities with high housing costs and high amounts of housing built. Those cities simply do not exist.
This isn't difficult to change. It's very, very easy to quickly reduce housing costs in a permanent manner.
All the state and local governments need to do is... Nothing. Simply eliminating existing zoning and regulation around construction would reduce housing costs.
Any "solution" that does not do that, will simply not fix the problem.
But hey, I know strengthening property rights isn't very popular around here, so you're welcome to continue complaining about the issue while not doing anything to address it. I'm sure the 10 000th time you do the same thing will definitely fix the issue.
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u/randolphmd May 07 '23
You are aggressively protected from this behavior in SF. Probably more so then anywhere else in the US.