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You can’t just say this and not say the staggering numbers
There are about 15 million empty homes in America and about 750,000 homeless people on any given night. It would be trivial to end homelessness without building a single new home. The next time someone is like “oh we need to build more housing” you look in their stupid fucking face and laugh because as long as housing is an investment commodity you can build all the housing in the world and it won’t matter
In practice, your plan would just result in abandoned dead towns in rural Kansas being turned into fenceless concentration camps for the formerly homeless.
Truth. “Ending homelessness” unfortunately isn’t just as easy as “give them homes.” There a huge hurdles to overcome that are created by other ghoulish aspects of capital.
Just one example, a huge proportion of unhoused people suffer from addiction and PTSD (veterans hugely overrepresented) and what this means for some solutions like building big apartment buildings (called “permanent supportive housing”) can devolve into conflict and interpersonal violence without meaningful recovery and mental health support—which of course we know is also restricted by a for-profit model of care.
And again that’s just one example. Another example I commented elsewhere is that @ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com’s plan without providing transportation could result in malnutrition or health concerns by positioning victims of homelessness deep in food and care deserts. This of course is the inhuman exploitation of healthcare under the fist of capital.
Don’t mistake ofc, there are some very smart people out there working hard to make plans through this maze, but that maze exists, and is difficult, and I don’t like laughing at people putting in the labor to explore the solution.
While having a home may not immediately solve those problems, they are infinitely harder to solve when you don't have a home
Indeed! Just combating the “laugh in their stupid faces” and “it would be trivial” of the person I am responding to. No other disagreements. :)
there are plenty of houses and land just kept empty for the speculative value in almost every city
It would be trivial to end homelessness without building a single new home.
I mean, no, but I get what you mean. Plenty of empty homes are in areas with low homeless density, so you would need a non-trivial system to transition homeless people, get them jobs, transportation to grocery, education and medical, etc.
Again you are not wrong cuz I get what you mean but, for example, if you see a project tackling homelessness by building housing (especially in urban and historically zoned areas, and especially when it’s government or ngo owned [not for investment]) it doesn’t necessarily mean they are full of shit, just that they are engaging on a different front of the battle. :)
Plenty of empty homes are rental units in areas with high homeless density, we would just have to re evaluate our relationship with treating housing as a commodity which is literally what I said
21,000 empty residential units in Philadelphia as of 2024, 5200 homeless in Philadelphia around the same time. Many cities would follow this trajectory.
But use some cities where the homelessness issue is absolutely tremendous:
NYC 247,000 vacant units and 350k homeless with the broadest definition of homelessness. Not enough, but the surrounding metro area could cover and transportation is more addressable here. Additionally NYC has 88,000 rent stablized units off the market, obviously not enough to cover here but enough to make a serious dent. Rent stablized units will stay empty because landlords would rather deny housing to a human and keep “equity” in their portfolio then rent at an affordable price and pay for renovations to make livable housing.
LA - 93-111,000 empty residential units. 75,000 homeless
The narratives that you and @woodscientist@lemmy.world perpetuate aren’t inherently untrue, they become true in some scenarios like NYC. But what they primarily do is defend a system where wealthy elites commodify housing instead of allowing it to be a human right.
When I was younger in my career I worked mobile therapy and one part of that was crisis response, which included responding to the cops when it was -2 degrees F out and they found a homeless person camping. I would often have to just drive around with them until morning because all the shelters are full or take them to my office and let them hang out while I did paperwork so they wouldn’t freeze to death. When I encounter your rhetoric I think of that, and the similar response when it would be 100+ degrees in summer, and I wonder how you can think that not housing someone is ever the correct choice
I used to work for an organization in Atlanta that was somewhat similar to Habitat for Humanity. We existed ostensibly to build and renovate low-cost housing for homeless people. Our basic course of action was 1) buy an abandoned house that numerous homeless people were squatting in; 2) roust the homeless people out so we could do the renovation (they literally had us carpenters doing this rousting, which was an interesting experience for a liberal college boy on a co-op like myself); 3) leave the house empty because we couldn't find anyone who could both afford the mortgage and wanted to live in these neighborhoods. Like, it was crazy how much worse we were making the homeless problem.
Looking back on it decades later, I'm pretty sure this was a giant charity scam. We raised large amounts of donor money and very little of that went into actual renovations of anything. I'm not saying Habitat is or was like this, but we sure seemed to be.
You were part of the commodification of housing, sorry. This is a scam to kick squatters out and create “equity”, which can then be borrowed against for further real estate speculation
Your intentions were noble but you were used and your labor was stolen in the worst possible way, you created further wealth for wealthy people and evicted squatters into the street. I’m sorry that you were used in this way
your labor was stolen
TBF we mitigated that to some extent by getting high a lot and knocking off at 3:30 to drink beers.
How you scope a problem is a choice. It's possible to make bad choices, but most people make reasonable ones. How to solve homelessness in Philadelphia, in a specific neighborhood therein, in the state of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern US, in the US as a whole, etc, are all reasonable problems to think about.
Different scopes of homelessness problem will have different extents to which supply, transportation, various policy choices, greedy investors, etc. influence the issue. Some places, reducing the value of places based on how long they've been empty might help, other places it may have little effect. It's actually many related problems, rather than one big one, kind of like cancer.
And I tend to agree with what you're saying, at smaller scopes, it really is a simpler problem. People camping outside vacant units should just be housed. Offering someone on the streets of Pittsburgh an apartment in rural Indiana might not actually be very helpful.
Scope and perspective are very important and homelessness won't be universally solved by any one solution or cookie cutter response.
It's wild to me though that things like housing first programs have been shown to work, vacant buildings like malls could be repurposed as shelters, golf courses could be campgrounds.
But instead they will ship homeless across state lines to places like California and New York for them to burden the state elsewhere, and homeless help programs get so grifted that it can cost $50 to put a PB&J into a homeless man's hands.
In the end, what we can all agree on is this: We don't have a resource problem; we have a distribution problem.
Downvote all you want lmao this is researched social services data, look it up, not at all even my opinion 😂 I promise I am on the same side as you and just discouraging “laughing in the stupid faces” at people working for the good of our underprivileged neighbors. ❤️
I hate how toxic this site is gyatt damb.
And don't get me started on "luxury" housing - projects that do less than nothing to address the problem. If I had my druthers it would be illegal to put up any new luxury housing in any municipality that has an identifiable homeless population.
In the same vain, we have the technology and ability to give everyone on earth access to clean drinking water. We just can't do it and still run a profit, so it doesn't get done. Capitalism is the enemy of humanity.
The GOP is working hard to fix this ... by greatly increasing the number of homeless people.
I have a few suggestions to alleviate this.
Bear in mind that I find it OK, or even desirable, for people to invest, and have some properties to rent to support them in their later years.
1- build public housing, with a rent equivalent to something like 40% of minimum wage. Building should done in random areas, to prevent ghettos from appearing.
2- tax the fuck out of vacant houses.
3- tax house ownership, by individuals or corps, progressively, to discourage accumulation and speculation.
Have 1 house? 0%, 2->10%, 5->15%, and so on, so that having more than let's say, 10 units stops making sense.
3- tax productive empty land (developpable, housing/comercial/agri) like empty homes, to make speculation and accumulation non attractive.
Thare are many more, I'm sure but these protect private property, investment, would lower prices, make housing accesible, while normalizing the sector.
This is democratic socialism. Allow capitalism, but keeping extremes in check, while providing a safety net.
This is democratic socialism. Allow capitalism, but keeping extremes in check, while providing a safety net.
I see americans saying this fairly often, but what you describe is social democracy, not democratic socialism
Whole point of capitalism is breaking the game to get ahead. The meta is too advanced, and we no longer get good stuff out of it as a side effect; that waste has been largely eliminated.
Any solution will not last, unless the beast is slain, and the more we try the more we kludge up the engine. It's not worth running anymore, if it ever was.
Wasn't really ever worth it. There has been calculable dehumanization, exploitation, and genocides all in the name of profit and efficiency. The quality of life going up for some of us in some parts (which is largely because of unions anyways) should not excuse the harm that capitalism has done and continues to do.
As you say, the incentives in the system are not towards a prosperous and stable society, but towards maximizing how much you can squeeze out of people.
So in my opinion it was never worth it is essentially what I'm saying.
People are getting toxic at you so as OP i just want to send love for your radical [compared to the status quo] acknowledgment that vacant homes should be taxed.
Other people are being mean sickos for a percentage you mentioned, and though I share their perspectives, it still stands true that NO ONE in our current government would be caught dead saying such a radical anti-1% thing as far as I know. Keep fighting for human rights and don’t let the internet trolls push you backwards. ❤️
[There is time in the future for you to learn and perhaps become even more radical <like me lol ✨> but no shame for advocating for basic tier one human rights oriented policies.]
your radical acknowledgment that vacant homes should be taxed.
imagine thinking thats radical 🤣
how about housing as a human right? How about abolishing the class system where you have those that own and those who work? Any system which allows for "passive" income is by the definition of the phrase unjust.
Part of the problem is there is no market incentive for speculators and landlords to lower the costs of their units. They use software to set pricing with goes right up to the line of "collaboration" but doesn't quite cross it.
I like the idea of a tax or fine for empty housing that is porportional to the highest advertised lease price of the unit. Let's say 10% for starters, so if an apartment wants to jack the prices up on their "luxury" units to 2k a month, they pay $200 every month that unit is unfilled. 100% of that fine goes to subsidizing housing for low income renters. Now we have an incentive for housing prices to go down, but still have the ability for them to go up to meet actual market demands, and we provide more money for lower income renters to afford that housing in the first place. It also gives us another "lever" to pull to manage the housing market. Increasing or decreasing that tax/fine rate to manage real estate bubbles.
40%? Why not 30%? Or 20%, maybe even 10%?
I think it's better for building to be done mixed-style, eg fancier homes mixed with less fancy ones. Prevents ghettoisation too, and forces the rich to interact with the poor more.
Taxing vacant homes is meh, I think it's better to outright seize them. We then can claim we don't tax vacant homes (as there aren't any).
Plus not taxing vacant homes removes the incentive for the government to make MORE vacant homes. If it's taxed, at least let the vacant home tax be less to the government in terms of profit, than having them be occupied; but more taxed to homeowners. The extra money left should be used in a way that doesn't incentivise people to profit off vacancy. We could for example use it to build new homes which cannot be bought nor owned even partially by people already owning a home - which will drive down the price for vacant homes.
Thus we get an effect of:
too many vacant homes
--> vacancy tax (levied by independent non-profit volunteer agency, which gives a part to government, less to government than if it were occupied; thus giving the government an incentive to build homes).
--> remainder of both vacancy and occupancy tax goes to homebuilding by social housing cooperations (not landlords)
--> more homes are built.
--> More homes
--> price goes down.
--> People are inclined to sell the vacant homes.
--> Fewer vacant homes
--> Fewer are built
--> Price stabilises around rates where vacancy rates are at their lowest and the fewest second home occupiers exist.
We should also necessitate that as much as possible in the government is for and by the people themselves, as decentralised as possible.
Democratic socialism is not capitalism. Democratic socialism is a system without capitalism altogether. What you suggest is social democracy. Which, although it is good too, has its deficit in not tackling for-profit egoistic mindsets enough. While capitalism "excels" at raising productivity for the employer, socialism excels at raising living standards for all. Kropotkin has written more about this in his Conquest of Bread. Very good work, might I say!
Taxing vacant homes is meh, I think it's better to outright seize them. We then can claim we don't tax vacant homes (as there aren't any).
I wasn't super with your comment at first, but this point - - holy fuck, watch the "housing crisis" disappear overnight if this was even hinted at.
You can just say this without mentioning Utah, so I'll add to the conversation:
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how TL:DR: Give 'em a home, AND a social worker to figure out how to keep them housed.
https://jobs.utah.gov/homelessness/
https://www.unitedway.org/our-impact/financial-security/homelessness-home-ownership
Let's battle.
ba ba ba ba ba ba bumm bumm badum-dum (screen swirls in black)
mweeer bwer bwer-ner
mweeer bwer ner-ner
It’s by design
Humph....who wants to house the homeless? Certainly not me whose house is now worth 100x more than when I bought it!
I know you're being purposefully flippant, but just to point out that you don't need those kinds of returns in an actual healthy economy.
I would even argue that wild, unpredictable swings in value like that are the sign of unstable market speculation based on both fear and greed.
In a healthy economy houses are safe, boring, predictable, and highly regulated.
Unfortunately it isn't actually that straightforward. That number includes abandoned and run down homes that are currently unlivable, houses that aren't actually on the market because they're being remodeled, they exist in the middle of nowhere where people don't want to live, etc. Fundamentally, the problem with housing in the US is supply. We don't build enough housing in the places people want to live.
While on the topic, a lot of people say that housing is commodified and that's why it sucks. This is not accurate. Housing is treated as an investment that should go up in value over time, not a commodity that can be easily bought, sold, and traded.
If anybody is interested in learning more about housing in the United States from someone who studies this full time, I recommend Clayton Becker
That number includes abandoned and run down homes that are currently unlivable, houses that aren’t actually on the market because they’re being remodeled, they exist in the middle of nowhere where people don’t want to live, etc.
Would love a citation? The commonly cited numbers I know explicitly only include livable homes. Remodeling also excluded.
a lot of people say that housing is commodified and that’s why it sucks. This is not accurate. Housing is treated as an investment that should go up in value over time
yup and that sucks so bad BASED BASED BASED thanks for sharing
Housing is generally cited as the canonical opposite of commodity products. Each one has to be valued independently and there's often a huge delta between sales price and market price.
I am always on the lookout for different ways the same thing is taxed in different regions.
Australia's Victoria region (state?) taxes one on the total value of all real estate, with large increases if the total amount is high, the building is empty for more than 6 months, or the building is owned by a trust (Caution: Australian law may define these things differently than your government.)
Is that more houses that are unoccupied in the long-term or just unoccupied in general?
You'd also need to forcibly move the homeless population away from areas that have lots of homeless but no homes, to places with lots of homes but relatively few homeless. That means depopulating Los Angeles of homeless and instead moving them to... Maine, or Vermont, or Alaska, where there are lots of homes but nobody living in them.
Empty houses are relatively spread out pretty evenly. As in there are always more empty houses than homeless people.
There's an average of 38 empty houses per homeless person in the US. California has the lowest ratio and it is still 6 empty houses per homeless person.
Mississippi has the highest ratio with 205 empty houses per homeless person.
