- cross-posted to:
- publichealth@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- publichealth@mander.xyz
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I have an idea. Why don’t the empty houses just eat the smaller number of homeless people?
But then how else would those poor landlords could afford luxury SUVs? Or if they’re Russian, how else could they fund Russia’s genocide against Ukrainians?
I thought we were told to call them, “unhoused”. Did I miss something?
Because quibbling over labels is how to restore their dignity
The housing market crash, I believe was a lost opportunity. When the US government had to bail out banks, why did it not ask for those houses that went belly up. Could have started a social housing aid, here it could sell luxury homes to buy low cost housing to give to its most vulnerable citizens. It paid for those houses using people’s tax dollars, why not use it for the benefit of the people
Because Republicans were in charge when the bank bailout happened. At least the automaker one under Obama had them pay it back with interest.
We can be real and admit that democrats also don’t have an appetite for government housing like that. They had the chance to hold bankers to account for the massive fuck up and decided to not to.
because that’s socialism.
the concept of federal public housing was basically made illegal in the 90s by the welfare reform acts.
the federal government can’t do this by law. legally it is not allowed to increase the number of public housing units beyond those that existed in 1998. it’s called the Faircloth amendement.
Bailing out companies is also not capitalism, ideally should have left them then to go bankrupt
Like then at least their assets would have been sold to cover their losses. This way your government is not socialism but it is choosing who are the winners, since they cannot lose
yeah but it’s legal.
it’s it a solution or more that they’re are abandoned areas with empty houses in places with no jobs or investments which aren’t for for a community?
My simple solution ( although there is no simple answer to this complex question) is to put a 1% on the landlord for every empty home. After 2 years it goes doubles.
So if your a home owner with a second or even a third home you should be able to cover the cost or at least until you get someone in. But if you happen to own 50 plus over priced properties, you can either lower the price,or sell the house.
Properties should not be investment
The problems of the group of people whom we call “homeless”… has it ever really been a lack of homes?
There are homeless shelters with empty beds at night. Some people who probably really need them refuse to go there and instead sleep outside because they don’t want to be sober.
It’s amusing to think that if we just assign one empty home to each homeless guy - thus eliminating homelessness - all would be right. In the world. But I don’t think it works that way.
Kind of underselling addiction there with that “don’t want to be sober.” And ignores the mental problems that arise due to the stresses of poverty and homelessness.
Most successful plans for fights homelessness include mental health care. So, sure, you don’t need only an home… but also an home.
And if you are about to say “oh but that would be too expensive”, there are plenty of studies that repression/punishment/harassment costs way more in the end
people who think that way are naively projecting their middle class morality onto others.
they assume folks want upstanding productive lives… like themselves. what they fail to realize is many people simple do not.
i know tons of people who would be homeless, with fancy college degrees, if it weren’t for the bank of mom and dad propping them up and keeping them from fucking up their lives.
lots of people are lazy worthless shits. regardless of their wealth.
IMHO, the answer is simple.
No corporation may own more than X single family or multifamily (up to 4 family per building) housing units, other than for occupation by its employees, for more than 120 days. Any housing units owned for more than 120 days are taxed at a rate of 50% of their fair market value per year.
Watch how fast companies like Zillow that tried to get rich fast by ‘playing the housing market’ dump houses on the market.
I’m invested in real estate, and I want this to happen even though it’ll hurt me economically. Real estate is horrifically overvalued, and corporations owning huge numbers of single family homes / small multifamily homes are a big part of why.
I’m all for investing to make money. Some things should be considered public resources, not vehicles for investment. Land and health are among them.
Why should corporations be able to own housing at all? They don’t live in them.
I’ve been thinking along these lines for years. Contrary to what is often said, about landlords being leeches, I believe they provide a service. Not everybody can afford or wants to buy a house, but renting should be affordable.
Land, however, is a finite resource, and should be taxed accordingly, to redistribute wealth, and normalize the market.
I find people who invest on housing as a means to enhance their retirement, for example, fine.
However, hoarding and speculation that leads to inflated markets is not.
A proggresive taxation on individual owners, say 10-15% on the first 3 properties (maybe one or two could be second residences, why not), 20% on 5-10, 50% on 10-20, for example (I’m throwing numbers around) would make hoarding a diminishing returns game.
Businesses should have much higher brackets, on residential. Commercial should be taxed, but less so.
Empty residential should be taxed punitively, and also progressively, and after a certain period, made available to municipalities for social housing.
Capitalism is good, when there are effective checks.
Social housing should be a priority.
There are tons of ways to promote a sane and socially responsible market.
I believe in capitalism, with effective checks, and redistribution of wealth, progressively.
Bwahahahahahahah! Holy shit, this article is the epitome of doomerism and conspiracy theories. If anyone actually read this article and didn’t immediately peg it as brain rot… idk what to tell you. Go read a book. Not to say that homelessness isn’t a very real problem - but if your interpretation of a complex and multifaceted problem is to boil it down into a handful of evil people doing evil things who could be stopped by a few good people with courage and determination, then you aren’t understanding a real problem. You’re describing a Marvel movie.
The problem is many of them can’t manage themselves never mind a home. Sticking them in a house and walking off isn’t doing anyone a favor. How would they even pay for utilities, upkeep, and property taxes? We can’t afford to subsidize everything, many of us are struggling to get by ourselves. They’d need jobs to sustain themselves and I doubt many of them could hold a job or qualify for much. Also this just lumps every house in the US into a single category. If you are in CA and refuse to move to Detroit then it doesn’t matter how many available homes there are in Detroit.
I lost track of how many reasons you listed for not helping.
I challenge you to give us three solutions using the knowledge imparted in this post.
Unrealistic “solutions” are not helping. Everything I said has been pointed out even by advocates and those that work with the homeless. Post here how you would create a working plan.
You seem very determined to not have any solutions even if some very baseline options are offered to you.
“No you” is a silly response for an adult.
Well “No you” is essentially what you said so own it. Instead of addressing my points you attacked the messenger. A childish move.
Thanks for the chuckle. I see you’re a Reddit transplant.
Now those homes slowly rot and lose value and become dangereous to live in.
As a result, rich people can’t run airbnbs. Capitalists are losing in long term for pride/greed/incompetence.
At this rate they will require government subsidies to rebuild them later. All because those selfish low-to-upper middleclass people are refusing 50 year mortgages.
Doesn’t cost much to keep some upkeep temp in the house, that keeps away mold at least
the houses don’t lose value. the land goes up faster in value than the deprecation on the physical house.
the price of the land is what matters way more than the house on it.
To an extent. But I can buy a house for like 25% of the typical cost around here for a 1986 property versus a recent build, even with comparable location and land area.
Varies by locale, in LA the value of structures are likely a rounding error, in the middle of nowhere, the structure is nearly everything.
yes, but most of the population lives in urban centers. they don’t live in the middle of no where. and it’s not viable for them to move there.
there are houses 2 hours from my city that cost like 200K. i could easily by them. but I can’t live there because it would mean spending 4-5 hours in a car every day. there are no jobs in those towns. anything that’s an hours drive or less, is closer to a million dollars. which i can’t afford.
I run a condo building and there’s about half a dozen apartments in the building that have been sitting vacant for as long as I’ve been here for about 5 years now. The owners don’t even live in the country. Just apartments sitting there unused for years
they are an investment.
here in boston, chinese people buy up apartments for their children to go to college, years ahead of time. several vacant buildings near my own place. even if their kid doesn’t go to school here, it’s still an asset that appreciates. chinese landlord that lives half a globe away doesn’t care about renting it out either. it’s just a place to park their money.
I think you should be a resident with records of living in the country before being allowed to buy. Letting the Chinese wealthy buy up all our land is stupid and short sighted
As long as we refuse to decouple housing from a tool of speculation, we will not address affordable housing.
most people’s wealth is tied up in housing. so if you decouple that you will make most americans much poorer
I think it’s fine to use it as a speculation tool if you are living there. If not, then it should be a massive tax liability. Pressure people buying empty homes to either rent them to someone for cheap, live in them, or sell them.
this is precisely what NIMBYism is. People living in their own homes, who want to force up the value by preventing new homes from being constructed.
it’s also the reason for the crisis. without that attitude and all the zoning restrictions, our housing market would be much more cheap and flexible. but when you have towns that only permit like 50 new houses a a year, and the population is growing at 3x that, you have a serious problem
The flip side is when your state mandates allowing 4-6 homes on regular SFH plots and then your property value goes up because you can now build more housing
I think the concept of a tax penalty with some relief for having a tenant that isn’t being gouged sounds nice.
Hell, just requiring HAVING a tenant would be great for starters because of how many empty homes there are. If you’ve got the empty homes, and a tax penalty for them being empty, suddenly they’d have to compete for tenants. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
What we need is a mandated and enforced vacancy tax nationwide. Make it high enough to fix the housing crisis.
*Edited to add: according to the Wikipedia article I linked, Canada and the USA have cities that have implemented vacancy taxes. We need to do like France and Ireland and make it nationwide.
We prefer to call them investment properties.
Yes, these are built for investors only.
Also we have more churches than homeless people. If churches aren’t even helping one of the most disadvantages and the individuals damn near every holy book says to help. What are they doing? They don’t even help the homeless children.
We need a land value tax to stop real estate speculation.
And if you let people live in them they might depreciate in value. So…
or you cant rent them out in perputuity.
Thats not what depreciation means.
If youre trying to say the wear and tear decreases the property’s value, it wouldn’t decrease much more than a rented property, and the investor would have all that rent income.
Also they already get a tax break for depreciation…
In most jurisdictions you cant claim depreciation if the property is not available to rent.
I’d love to ensure everyone has an acceptable home and access to clean water and food. It seems like we could do that.
Conversely, I’ve seen people’s living situations and people are fucking gross. This includes home owners and non homeowners.
People get shit on and then just repeatedly shit on. I’m not sure what I would do, had I held the power. Probably let people have smaller homes and start there. Like those little mini homes? Still homes, still have housing, but limited. Earn more?
Idk. I’m not a politician.
That’s true, but also inversely generally being gross on a property does not outweigh the value of the property over time in most cases. Even having gross tenants over time at market rent generally results in net profit after they leave and any additional cleanup costs incurred, plus you still own the property at the end of the day, and if we’re talking about houses, you probably own the land too.
I’ve seen what you’re describing and I think what you’re getting at is more of a societal systemic issue related to mental health and income. Most people I think would like to live clean and healthy lives, but they either need mental health support they aren’t getting/can’t afford, etc, and/or are spending more time working/taking care of family/battling addiction or whatever and end up not taking care of themselves or where they live
But at the end of the day this is all anecdotal and the whole thing should be addressed by a governing body made up of compassionate voted-in representatives using available resources and a scientific approach that want to fix the problem rather than arbitrary individuals chatting about it
Yeah that makes sense. I do wish the humans were more caring of each other. We’re all here together to live. Why not help each other?
Are you trying to make a case that a gross tenant who doesn’t pay rent is the same as a nice tenant who does pay?
They specifically said that a gross tenant paying market rate is better than no tenant.
Jesus. I remember the figure being like, 10. Which was already absurd.
11 was the number I remembered it being. Been quoting that for years. Jesus Christ, it’s more than doubled. Wtaf is wrong with humanity
Fuck me, I only knew it was greater than the number of homeless people, didn’t realize it was by that much
Stupid people keep supporting their oppressors and getting mad at anyone who calls it out.
I think if you consider is as a percentage of all homes, the number doesnt look as insane. There’s about 133m homes and 17m are vacant according to the article which is roughly 13% of homes are empty.
I’m not sure what the average vacancy rate is in other countries is so not sure how bad 13% is but it doesnt sound as crazy as 27x.
Update: According to this article the US does rank pretty high in vacant properties. Im actually surprised Japan is 1st.
https://realestatemagazine.ca/canada-ranks-11th-for-the-highest-proportion-of-empty-homes/
One of my doomsday fantasies is to simply take one of the empty homes I see whenever I commute to work, since the fall of the government would probably make it hard for them to enforce the law. I’ve even worked out multiple options, it’s amazing how many mansions are simply empty because the right seller hasn’t come along to pay 30M for it or because it’s a summer home. Easily one half, I’ve counted.
You can even try now, but there is a ton of private security lately so you would need to wait until the fall of the empire first, I bet. Plus hey, it’s mountain side property so you’ll have the high ground in combat!
Plus probably solar or a generator, so you could keep that infinity pool warm.
Hell yeah, infinity pool / basic survival generator when the power plants are all derelict. But I’ll probably need to add an engineer to my post apocalypse stronghold to keep it maintained.
