No, it’s the consequences of capitalism.
There are over 15 million empty houses in America, over 5 million of those are in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the US.
770,000 people were counted as houseless in 2024.
Sure not every house is in great condition, and not every house is in a major city - but there is surely enough that people could use to if not house everyone, at the very least make a huge dent in that figure. The issue is people cannot afford to buy them because housing is seen as an industry not a basic life need.
Precisely. This is extreme inequity. There are plenty of resources to go around.
The future was stolen.
You know I see this figure a lot, but I wonder how many of these are actually liveable.
My grandfather’s old home is unoccupied, that’s because the roof entirely collapsed. The county refuses to remove it from the property taxes. Based on all available records it’s an unoccupied home, but it’s a total loss in reality.
Who knows, but you only need 5.13% to be in good condition to house everyone.
Plus getting them all up to code is huge job creation, so it’s win-win.
Also many people would volunteer to help restore these places for people’s use if it was actually a legal option.
Maybe, but a local credit union could create the money as a loan and it gets spent into the economy for a socially necessary purpose, which, counter-intuitively, does much more good than volunteers (setting aside the idea that paid workers are more reliable than volunteers). Technical solutions for all our problems already exist, finding them is not the issue, the issue is the political will to enact these ideas, which is just not there as a result of class war (which imo has also created the conditions that you can’t find enough people with the time & money to volunteer for this size task). My 2c.
Oh yeah we certainly have that many homes ready to be occupied tomorrow
There is enough housing. It sits unoccupied and sometimes disrepair.
Occupy Homes
that did happen on various degree, only 1 incident in the west last years ago.
Yes, though also some are in such economically depressed areas that you can barely get a job.
We also need to organize for clean public transit; in the meantime, there’s often plenty in bustling areas, as well.
Lots of empty apartments are in luxury buildings right in the best parts of big cities.
Fully furnished too, just empty tax shelters to be traded back and forth by billionaires and their kids when they need cash.
We need to convince the desk staff and security in this buildings to help people squat in them indefinitely.
Knowing how poorly these employers tend to compensate the staff, they may be happy to accept roommates in the accommodations.
But a lot of them are in densely populated suburbs or cities, driven out by the artificially inflated rental costs. The owners would rather have a few units empty than lower the rent.
- Crack down on price fixing
- Don’t let corporations run AirBNBs or similar
- Don’t let corporations own any rental building under approximately 10 units.
- Don’t let rental buildings have more than a low percentage of empty units for turn around. They have to lower the rent then. If it goes to $200/month, then so be it.
There are so many things to try, but Trickle Down Housing never works.
Don’t let corporations own single family homes. Drastically increase the tax rate for more than 3 houses by any single person. A landlords income is not producing anything useful, it’s stealing income from people actually providing society with something useful.
Drastically increase the tax rate for more than 3 houses by any single person.
I would say that it should start building the tax after one house and go drastic like you said on the 3rd.
hell yeah, rentals should be made prohibitively expensive to keep empty, if the city don’t have the demand to rent it? Then you should sell it at a price people will buy in a short enough time.
Best I can do is fed interest rate cuts.
Damn that backpack looking spacious af
A lack of housing is not the problem most places. The problem is that housing shifted from being a place for people to live to a way for people to acquire “passive income”. Hell, the very design of housing changed in a noticeable way: houses shifted from being homes to being feature laden investment vehicles.
Not a shitpost
Which makes it the ultimate shitpost.
Oh and the sidebar
Anything and everything goes.
Nah
I’m not really buying the no housing thing now. The thing is, it turned into a commodity. If you just build more, then those with all the money (because that gap is pretty damn vast nowadays) will just buy and hold and rent them
Wait till air comes next, or some stupid ass shit.
Building it isn’t the problem. My Republican shithole burb just bulldozed the last of our open space, to build 600 single family units starting in the “low one millions.” Can’t afford that? No problem. They’re also building 2000 condos, starting in “the mid 500s.”
Starting to see the real problem?
IMO: do what Vienna is doing: state provided apartments and flats, competing with everyone else. Try price fixing now, corpos. If Vienna did not have this, it would be at the same level as other european metropolises.
Edit: typo
We have plenty of housing. The problem is its all tied up with money hoarders. There are several times the number of empty houses than there are homeless. If we got rid hedge fund scumbags ability to horde everything including single family dwellings it would go a long way toward fixing this inequity.
Residential housing shouldn’t be owned by corporations. It should be built by them and then sold to individuals.
A co-op could handle it without much problem.
Yeah, anything that prevents the financialisation of residential housing floats my boat. In Iceland we have big corpos selling each other houses at over market price to increase the average m^2 price in an area. It’s pretty bonkers.
In the US, money laundering accomplishes essentially the same thing.
Haha
I was just watching a YT travelogue of a US guy in his 50s (Gen X) who was travelling the world frugally with a backpack because he can’t afford rent in the US. He had some investments and spent less travelling then working and living in the US, so his investments have grown in the 3 yrs he’s done this.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNKV0CMgcVUiJNdA-JNlJA
Plent of US retirees in Cambodia for the same reaon, can’t afford the US anymore.
2030 is more like ⚰️
2030: a tent
2050: a cardboard box
After the embarrassment of the last ten years, and the ongoing embarrassment until the fat orange child rapist dies, then I’d say getting a backpack and leaving the Nazied States of America is probably the best move.
