New home sales plummet 17% to 2-year low as rising mortgage rates sideline buyers
New home sales plummet 17% to 2-year low as rising mortgage rates sideline buyers
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There's like 17 empty homes for every homeless person
We've built thousands of new units in my city since covid and all of them are apartment complexities owned by megacorps or SFH bought instantly by private equity. The price just keeps going up.
The amount of homes we build has no effect on price if all the big players just get to buy them and increase their ability to price fix
Homeless people are pretty ill-equiped to buy houses.
We have more homes than homeless.
We leave houses empty to rot because the money doesn't exist for people who need them to be able to buy them.
It's incredibly apathetic that we don't all consider that horrible and evil.
We're (likely) at record lows for housing vacancy rates (census.gov report from 2022), and the vacancy rate doesn't seem to have meaningfully increased with higher mortgage rates (updated data for 2024 seems to be about the same as that report).
And even if we did have a higher vacancy rate, that wouldn't have any correlation to the homeless population, since I imagine many if not most of these vacant properties are occasionally used for vacations and whatnot (could probably figure that out from the data linked above), meaning the owner wouldn't be interested in having it be set up for use by homeless people, and they're probably in areas with a lower homeless population anyway.
The problem of housing for homeless people is completely separate from housing vacancy rates. People aren't going homeless because there isn't enough housing available, they're going homeless because they can't afford the housing that's available. Making more housing available that homeless people can't afford won't solve anything, we need charities and government agencies to provide housing for free or very cheap.
17 homes for every homeless person in the country.
We let them sit empty instead of making the logical decision to use them and help fix our housing shortage.
This will never get better until it is illegal for corporations to own homes
We let them sit empty instead of making the logical decision to use them and help fix our housing shortage.
That's not up to "us," it's up to homeowners. We can't just snap our fingers and have all available housing available for use by homeless people, the owners wouldn't be okay with that.
The closest we can get is to increase property taxes, which would discourage people from having second (or more) properties.
But like the statistics show, that isn't the issue here. Housing vacancies are down, almost to record lows, which means there's a supply problem. We can discuss what kind of supply we need (SFH vs multi-family), but the vacancy rate isn't the problem here. We need more housing, and we need better social programs to help w/ homeless people, we don't need to hit a 0% vacancy rate though.
We value people's ability to make money off of human needs more than other people's ability to obtain human needs, it's as simple as that.
We perpetuate an immoral and unethical society so greedy people can indulge in greed. I'm sorry it doesn't sicken you like it should, we've been trained to accept this unethical system.
Whether it sickens me is irrelevant. I'm talking about the facts of the situation, which don't support the implication that we could solve homelessness by using vacant properties.
We should work toward solving homelessness, but vacant properties aren't relevant to those solutions.