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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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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.
there are plenty of houses and land just kept empty for the speculative value in almost every city
Truth.
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. :)
Housing First policies have good results.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
Indeed!
(emphasis mine)
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.
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
TBF we mitigated that to some extent by getting high a lot and knocking off at 3:30 to drink beers.
lol no, I am telling people not to “laugh in peoples stupid faces.” As I said multiple times lmao. This comment above alleviates the failures of your first comment so thank you for clarifying your original directives.
COUGH COUGH GAG GAG THE SMOKE THE SMOKE WHERE IS IT COMING FROM OH ITS THE STRAW MAN YOU SET ON FIRE
So what are you advocating for? A theoretical future in which more homes are built correct? This takes time which implies the following: tonight a person who is homeless remains homeless and the landlord class who is currently raking it has their investment portfolio protected. If anything they likely make tons of money on developing the additional housing you describe.
Versus the state, today, acting and properly utilizing the housing supply that exists and housing people, today? Again you can misrepresent this by saying “there will be transportation problems” (there won’t, unless you protect the landlord class), or you can misrepresent this by saying “you’ll create ‘homeless camps’ in rural Kentucky with food deserts and no support” (you won’t, unless you protect the landlord class).
This is why i say you are defending wealthy elites, this is why i say you are defending not housing someone. I am not saying that your positions are incorrect, building more housing is necessary, changing zoning laws to be less car dependent and to change the structure of american suburbia is necessary, yes, agreed. Food deserts are a problem, access to services is a problem. But these are long term issues with long term solutions.
They can be coupled with a more drastic and forceful short term mediation that admittedly will not fix the problem entirely - temporary homelessness will always exist in some form as long as people kick each other out - and that will help the person that is living in a tent or their car or just sleeping in a fucking alley because the shelter is over capacity right now. And then the shelter may not be so constantly stressed of resources, can maybe even afford to stay open longer, and the person temporarily homeless will actually have a place to go.
i’m not advocating anything lmao i am saying it’s shitty to laugh in peoples faces.
if there is a region with high homless density compared to few vacant homes and it is determined that building housing is cost effective in service of that community i will not laugh in the aid worker’s faces.
i will not laugh. that’s all i mean, and if you actually tried to pay attention you would notice it’s all i have ever said.
i am blocking you now thanks for thoroughly embarrassing yourself
Okay well overly attach yourself to an obviously hyperbolic statement that wasn’t even directed at you and get offended, I guess.
Or don’t since your response to being challenged is to apparently disengage.
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.
Thank you for this concise summary!
Find me an example of any city in the USA aside from NYC where the homeless population outranks the vacant home rate
I did not include this but when looking at those numbers this was the same for Seattle, for San Francisco, for Michigan, etc.
I’m not surprised if it exists but given LA and NYC have some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country I doubt there are many examples
The idea presented was never “ship homeless people all over to displace them and also put them in camps” but notice how it immediately gets twisted to the worst interpretation to defend commodity landownership
I'm not defending commodity landownership. Rent seeking behavior shouldn't be rewarded, and I think housing people by transferring ownership of vacant units to them without remuneration to prior landlords would promote the public good.
My point was that as you change the perspective by which you look at a problem like homelessness, the casual factors change, as do the sorts of solutions that people consider. Yes, some of them are really bad at large scales, and I'd rather focus on smaller scales for that reason. At city/metro scales, it's a lot easier to make meaningful change, and there's something special about helping your neighbors like that. You've kind of made my point for me, there.
Me neither but u/ragebutt also twisted my words in this way. I suggest disengaging they are so mean lol.
The problem with this is that every market is going to have a certain number of empty homes in it in any given time. Properties are bought and sold, vacated and re-rented, and often in this process they sit vacant for a few months. Properties need to be cleaned or renovated. It doesn't matter how egalitarian the home ownership distribution is. It doesn't matter if you're talking socialized housing. Any housing market will have some large number of vacant units at any given time.
My point is that it's incredibly foolish to just look at the raw numbers of "vacant" homes. Most of those "vacant" homes are only temporarily vacant as part of the churn of the real estate market.
The truth is home construction dropped off a cliff after 2008. The real causes of the housing crisis are due to:
Vacant units are not a significant cause of the high cost of housing. Are units sometimes kept empty because of financial reasons or to avoid the rent dropping in certain saturated markets? Yes. But that behavior cannot be maintained long term. In practice, there isn't some vast supply of vacant housing, in places where people want to live, that can just be handed over to the homeless.
This sounds nice until we see that in the majority of markets that vacant units outnumber the homeless population by a significant factor.
You can again misconstrue my argument and say that people will be shipped off to camps in the middle of fucking nowhere (which is ridiculous) or you can go to this argument which that now there are just not enough homes, which is also fucking bullshit.
Or maybe you can stop licking the boots of landlords and understand that commodified housing is causing this issue.
85,000 vacant units in Seattle vs 17k homeless on any given night, 54,000 using the broadest definition of “homeless”
80,000 vacant units in Michigan vs 33,000 homeless again using the broadest definition
291,000 vacant units in Wisconsin vs 3200-20,000 homeless (again depending on how broadly you define “homeless”)
I challenge you to find a city outside of NYC where the vacancy rate doesn’t grossly outweigh the homeless population. And in NYC case you have the surrounding metro area. “B-b-b-b-but properties are being renovated!” Bullshit. 85,000 properties in Seattle being renovated? Come on. At least some of those are some rich fucks second property that they use sparingly. Restrict that, use it for low income housing, done.
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.
The thing is that we always have vacant homes. Homes that are under renovation or waiting for the next tenant to move into or are in the wrong location. Vacancy rates are currently at one of the lowest points in history. We're doing a better job cramming people into available housing than ever before and it's not enough.
Missing some key education a moderate amount. The numbers this cites specifically point to livable homes. So renovations and transitions are explicitly excluded from that count.
Further, vacancy rates are primarily increased by rent-seeking behaviors (capital) like dual home ownership, AirBnB, holding homes empty as an investment, etc. This is what the post is speaking to. People owning multiple homes. As such…
False. If we were doing a better job, the number of homes per rich individual would not be growing.