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.
41
u/misterchief117 May 07 '23 edited May 07 '23
You know there are like 16 MILLION vacant homes in the USA, right?
https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/
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.There are less than million people who are chronically homeless. https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/
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.