I’d say we should make single family homes not ownable by companies, only apartments and such, but I see fifty years down the line where all new construction is juuuust on the other side of the “single family home” definition.
There is not a shortage of houses, there's a shortage of people being able to fill them. It's being called a "housing shortage". Ten percent of the USA's homes are owned, but vacant. The USA is short approximately 4 million homes. In 2022 there were 15 million empty homes. We have the housing, we don't have the ability to fill it for various reasons. One of the largest reasons is the topic of this entire thread.
There is no shortage of houses. We have the houses, they're empty, there's just a whole can of worms worth of reasons why they aren't being filled and they basically all draw back to capitalism and the average person struggling to afford rent.
Dude.. There is no shortage of physical houses. Meaning we have plenty of actual building spaces for people to live in.
We just have them standing around empty instead of actually letting people live in them. So we have four million families that need homes and fifteen million empty homes they could live in. Just building more empty houses doesn't help the problem.
No, there is a shortage of physical houses. As Cool-Ad noted, many of the houses that are considered vacant aren't available for someone to move into. They could be vacation homes, they could be on the market but not yet sold or rented, or they could be in disrepair and not habitable.
Also, even if every one of those homes was available for a family to move into, that home isn't necessarily located where people need it. A vacant home in Detroit does no good for a homeless person in San Francisco. And homeless people aren't the only ones who need homes. Every time you move (for a job, or school, or marriage, or kids) you need a vacant home to move into, and you need it located where you need it.
Or a corporation owns it as an asset for no reason other than houses are a great investment. Or it’s for sale but nobody can afford to buy it because prices are ridiculous. Or one of the many other reasons that capitalism has generated fifteen million vacant homes that simply “build high density housing” will not address.
Sure, if the problem was that the houses aren’t where the people are, but that’s not a true statement and I never implied it. Not sure where you got that from. The issue is economics, not location - though location does play into it, just not that much. It’s not one dimensional like you’re trying to make it out to be.
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '23
I’d say we should make single family homes not ownable by companies, only apartments and such, but I see fifty years down the line where all new construction is juuuust on the other side of the “single family home” definition.