There's a 3 bedroom condo in my building that has been vacant for 10 years now. They still pay the fees automatically but they live in Hong Kong. So it just sits there empty, while people are looking for homes
I've been to a discussion about house occupation and vacancy recently and one take home message for me was that it's better to frame this topic about vacancy than about homelessness. When we talk about homeless people, we talk about scarcity, people wanting to take something away from us. Once we talk about empty houses, we talk about mismanaged abundance. Let people use houses of the rich they don't need anyway, they don't even use but rather leave it empty than let poor people in.
There is a fundamental mismatch between vacant property location and places where there is a housing shortage once you exclude REIT one multi family complex within major cities (which rely on RealPage to keep vanacy and price up) and ultra high end in NYC
A lot of vacant real estate are second houses at the beach or some other vacation places... there are no jobs there for people to support themselves in fact during winter migrant labour leaves
Housing must be build where there is demand for the said housing, ie where people can get jobs to support themselves which is urban cores along with 25 mile radius before commute becomes retarded.
I don't have issues if neighbors are loud. As in children playing, music or having people over for a party.
What i can't have, is adults arguing, obnoxious unnecessary noise like shutting close doors with full force or trampling around as if they would be wearing those Dutch wooden shoes.
This is from my perspective, living in an apartment building, thinking about the neighbor living above me.
Edit: once i had a couple living above me. One night they came home late and fucked themselves up the stairs. Slowly.
That was the most uncomfortable experience i had with neighbors.
It's actually that a small cheap home and a large expensive home aren't much different in cost for a builder, but the second nets way more profit. So no builder wants to build and sell starter homes. Thus, housing shortage for working class people looking for affordable homes.
Somewhat still impactful is that construction has a worker shortage, but that's probably in part cause they don't get paid enough to attract more new tradespeople. If they DID get paid enough, it would drive up prices further since builders still want the same cut and their margins aren't that crazy to begin with.
How do we incentivize building and selling starter homes? They need to be more profitable relative to expensive big homes, or working class people need more income to afford them to increase demand at rates builders would make good money on due to volume.
I think the growth of townhomes for sale and five over one condos is helping with this somewhat, but not enough. Many of those get used for apartments or short term rental too because those are still more profitable than just selling.