"there are more empty houses than homeless people in the United states" is a crazy soundbite bc it's like. actually I think it's okay to say no one should be homeless without relying on a factoid that counts abandoned shacks in the middle of Iowa as viable. like any actual solution to homelessness feels like it necessarily involves a little bit of yimbyness unless you want to like. send the dimes square intelligencia to smelt pig iron post cancelled I have an idea to run by mamdani we're sending the red scare girls to the rice paddies
aiui there are more empty houses in any given city than there are homeless people in that city, in which case this would really not apply. but trying to actually vet that is really really frustrating since getting an accurate count of empty housing units anywhere is nearly impossible.
people will list "vacancy rates" or numbers of "vacant units" but what they're listing is units for rent or sale, which is not the same question at all; besides the units on the market we know there's a ton more units in housing-crisis cities that people are sitting on for investment purposes or just as vacation homes or something, so the claim that there's enough of them to house the homeless is at least not flat-out impossible. is it plausible? I honestly don't know how to check.
Which is why vacancy taxes are such a good idea. If there ARE a bunch of empty properties in your city, you get an approximate idea how many (by how much vacancy tax is collected from how many people), you incentivize filling those vacancies, and you collect a bunch of revenue that can ideally be funneled to homeless services.
And if there aren't, then no harm done. And now you know.
