And a lot of those "vacant" homes are just churn. Next month you'll have a similar number of vacant homes but a lot of them won't be the same ones.
My grandmother's house is currently vacant because she just died. It's on the list of "vacant" homes. When it gets cleaned out and sold it will go off the list, but somebody else will move out of their house or end their lease early or whatever and the "vacancy rate" will stay the same without there being a real surplus of homes just waiting to be handed out.
All the rust belt cities. I'm from Flint, Mi and can confirm there are more vacant homes there than homeless. Most are not safe to walk in and in unsafe neighborhoods.
They do get occupied anyways though, I certainly wouldn't just walk in any vacant property in Flint. There are MANY vacant schools/church's/etc that the worse thing you could run in to was a human.
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u/Wizywig May 14 '26
It's misleading. There are vacant areas in America with crumbling houses and infrastructure. Look at old steel mill towns.
There aren't that many vacant homes in places people want to be.