This is what squatting was invented for, isn’t it?
This shit is going to turn me into a maoist
I don’t understand. How much higher can rents go?
rent_target = your_income - beans - tent
There are 16 million vacant houses–28 for every homeless person.
First: there are roughly 700,000 homeless people at any one time in the US, according to HUD. If there are 16M vacant homes, that’s more like 23 per homeless person. So the math is a bit off.
Second: I see a lot of vacant homes in my area. Most of the should be condemned and bulldozed. There’s one I drive by every day on my way to work that’s covered with kudzu. I remember seeing the coroner there about two and a half years ago, and the house has just sat there since. My guess is that it’s locked in probate, there were no heirs that could be located, or something like that, and so there’s nothing that can be done with it until it’s seized by the county and auctioned off to pay the tax debt on the property (that’s usually about ten years or so in my area). I would lay a sizeable wager on many of the 16M vacant homes being claimed being properties like that; places that are houses in name, but not suitable to live in.
I bet someone who has no where to live would still happily live there over nowhere
Okay, and someone that’s starving would rather dumpster dive. But we shouldn’t be feeding starving people out of a dumpster, just because they’ll take it over nothing.
Also, FWIW, I’m pretty far away from a large metro area, and about 20 miles outside of a two traffic light town. Living in any of these abandoned homes would make it very challenging for an unhoused person to find a job, or even get to a grocery store.
A couple percent of the housing market is also going to always be vacant due to turnover as well. That accounts for a large portion, if not the majority of that 16M.
Spread the joyful message that squatting is an option!
What is this doing to the housing market?
I am 40 and single. I make 90k a year, have 130k from total proceeds from the sale of my previous house owned for 17 years towards down payment initial repairs/upgrades with hopefully 10k to savings, and very good credit.
I cannot find a house I can afford. If it’s less than 350k, it’s either a complete disaster on the inside requiring 50k or more to make decent, it’s under 1500 sq feet and very claustrophobic inside, it’s a cheaply built house in a cookie cutter neighborhood that’s already showing it’s quality, or it has less than 2 full baths and a 1 car garage. Or the taxes in the area are over 7k a year.
And a LOT of the houses have the same gray vinyl flooring that’s as ugly as it is cheap.
I work in the development department of a city that’s and enclave for the ultra-rich. Literally every household in the city is millionaires or better.
Every house in the city is unique. Every build site requires civil and structural engineering. Every home has an architect designing it to be a unique structure. The average new build here is 8-10 million dollars, with the big ones being 50 million+.
We’re talking tennis pavilions on the roof, indoor arboretums and galleries, the works.
And they’re all built cheaply and fall apart within a decade.
They’re shitty houses, but when people are dropping 8-figures on them, they can afford to drop a couple million more on a remodel every 5-10 years.
You can’t buy a quality house anymore.
I’m starting to think the play is to buy undeveloped land and just bite the bullet on the cost of building a house/a road to the nearest govt maintained road.
Unless you’re physically building it yourself, it’s still gonna get corners cut at every stage.
Also, don’t underestimate the drainage and erosion control engineering required for a home and a road. Those cookie cutter neighborhoods have regional drainage and detention. Your undeveloped land won’t.
I’m sure with some research you could find a company willing to follow your specifications and instructions, but obviously that comes with cost.
To your second point, thanks for the heads up. There’s plenty more research that I need to do before I worry about drainage, but I’ll keep the thought in mind.
Septic and Drainage should come before any kind of detailed architecture. It’ll save you 30 grand in Engineering revisions if you don’t have to re-do the drainage plans.
Also, never let an architect be in charge of a project. It’s like having the font designer be in charge of office software.
Where are you looking?
NW ohio, no more than an hour from work.
Your comment shows American relationship with space of their homes. I live in <1500 sq feet home with my girlfriend and I wouldn’t call it claustrophobic.
How often do you host dinner parties? How often do more than 4 guests attend? Do you want to have family over for the holidays? Do you ever plan to have kids? These are pretty common reasons to need at least 2 baths and 3 bdrms.
It’s really dependant on how the layout is. Generally 1500sqft isn’t a problem however if it has 5 rooms squeezed into the house it begins feeling cramped especially if you have a large family. I have 1800sqft and the first floor has plenty of space but upstairs has a low ceiling (6.5ft) and about a 2ft wide hallway leading to 2 full bedrooms, a full sized bath, and a small guest room that’s only slightly bigger than a broom closet. There isn’t a way to have rooms downstairs so I consider my upstairs cramped but my overall living conditions fine. Now imagine a single floor utilizing that space needing just as many bedrooms and it begins getting cramped with the kitchen, living room, dining room.
How many baths can you be in at once?
I’m trying to think of resale value, especially since 1.5 baths around here stay on the market for a very long time.
So you want house with a high value but don’t want to pay for one. That’s your complaint.
I think it means he can’t reasonably rent a room if the tenant doesn’t have their own bathroom.
Bro makes 90k a year, he’s barely scraping by and is living paycheck to paycheck. Having 2 bathrooms is like the minimum that you need in a house. Anything less is like third world country living.
Bro makes 90k a year, he’s barely scraping by and is living paycheck to paycheck. Having 2 bathrooms is like the minimum that you need in a house. Anything less is like third world country living.
I sometimes wonder if I’m living in an entirely different America than other people
Have you checked? Sometimes I don’t know what the fuck species I am.
Mass market single family housing is a disease that the developers have perfected. Using the cheapest materials, in the cheapest way, with the laziest inspectors.
It’s even worse when you get outside of the cities into the county. At least here in Texas, that means there are no building inspections. You just have to trust that the builder made it right.
And don’t depend on the warranty to save you. The common 10-year warranty is a lie. It’s 1-year cosmetic (there are no visible cracks in the wall), 2-year functional (there are cracks, but everything still works), and 10-year structural (the doors no longer close, the wiring is failing, and the foundation is more like gravel now, but the building hasn’t actually been condemned - which it won’t be because there are no inspectors).
There is one very important aspect that shouldn’t be ignored about the fact at the end. Although it may be technically correct, it is almost certainly not geographically correct. If filling those homes requires a mass movement of people requiring even something as little a a couple of hour drive, is it really relevant?
Don’t get me wrong, I hate corporate ownership of residential property, and I also think empty homes, especially if it’s a second, third, fourth, etc., should result in some kind of tax penalty. I don’t think using easily discounted facts is ultimately in our best interest when pushing for change to address these issues.
I’m no anarchist, but…
Just a
couple3000,000 pipe bombs…Just sayin’… Social problem solved.
Edit: I just ruined my chances of holidaying in the US.
you’re talking to a large collection of cowards here unfortunately.
Edit: I just ruined my chances of holidaying in the US.
Not missing much. Just an expensive country that thinks we are more important than we really are.
That’s actually fewer homes that Blackstone owns than I would have thought.
Not that it makes things any better, I just would have expected the number of homes Blackstone owns to be in the millions by now. Maybe they have subsidiaries that are buying up homes under different names.
Obviously, there are plenty of other corporations that own thousands of homes so it doesn’t make much of a difference.
A more functioning government would have immediately dropped the hammer on said business practices.
We live in a Corporate bordello.
Add in other corps:
20% of all property purchases are for investments: 65% of those properties purchases are by people who own 10 or more properties.
Doesn’t shock me at all. Like I said, it doesn’t make much of a difference which corporations actually own them. But I’m still surprised because if someone had asked me how many homes Blackstone in specific owned, I would have guessed a lot more.
Curious to know if they’re counting buildings or units. Blackstone owning one ranch-style house would be very different than Blackstone owning a 500 unit tower block.
I don’t know, IMO a home is a home. You can buy a condo just like you can buy a house. You can buy a condo bigger than some houses.
A very big building holds more people than a very little building
What difference does that make? This is about housing prices, not capacity.
The cost of housing isn’t just the price of the unit. If you need to spend an extra $500/mo on the commute, plus random budget buster repairs, a “cheap” house can be less affordable than an “expensive” one.
I’m sure they have more hidden away in subsidiaries and shell companies
That was my guess.
I genuinely don’t understand why this is legal. It’s tied housing with extra steps, isn’t it?
Just wait until we find out that Blackstone’s algorithms, trained on actual real estate deals, are giving preferential treatment to a man named Dave with bad credit over a woman named Lashawnda with good credit.
Well, okay, but maybe you should also wait.
The worst part is that there’s so much class discrimination that you don’t even need to bring race into it to see how broadly fucked it is. I personally have a friend that’s an older white guy who the bank wouldn’t approve for a 15% down mortgage that would cost him about $1000/mo, but he had no issues getting approved at a manufactured home lot where the lot rent alone is $950/mo, plus the $500/mo for the home itself. All because he used to be poor and had some really unfortunate financial luck, he gets the privilege of paying twice as much for objectively worse housing.
I wonder if the board of Blackstone have names and addresses…
Well they obviously have 300000 addresses duh
Nationalize it.
Sure, and we can develop plans for where people must live and what jobs they must have. Maybe a new national plan every five years.
…… we know how well that’s worked in the past
Do you want your housing to be on the line every election? Just look at what Trump is saying today about removing immigrants and liberals from jobs and country.
No imagine he’s your new landlord too.
This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing. The first thing we need to do is correct this problem. My suggestion is an increasing property tax premium on vacant homes. I’d suggest doubling the tax rate for each consecutive year a property is vacant for more than 185 days-just over half a year.
This has the side benefit of making Airbnb landlording less feasible as a small time investment strategy.
This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing.
There are regional housing shortages. The classic example is in Northern California (particularly around San Fransisco and San Jose) where you’ve got these huge tracks of ranch-style homes and barely any vertical development. A lot of that is due to the seismic activity in the region, making taller buildings more expensive to construct. But more is due to the historical development practices of throwing up a thousand cheepo ticky-tacky units on real estate they acquired dirt-cheap from the state and flipped as fast as possible. Now the land is developed as this low-traffic sprawl, and people are obsessed with propping up their land-value to justify the seven figure notes their carrying. So building denser housing is politically and logistically prohibitive.
Basically, the problem isn’t a housing shortage so much as a shit job of urban planning. Yes, houses exist, but they’re hours away from job sites with no quality mass transit to move people between residence and work. No, you can’t just pile people into these low-occupancy (often badly maintained) units if they don’t have the kind of money to afford their own cars, pay for childcare, afford the utilities, cover maintenance of the units, etc, etc. That’s a recipe for slums.
At some level, you need to actually plan your residential economy. That’s a harder kind of work that politicians and bureaucrats elected based on their cool Tweets and Instagram feeds don’t really want to do.
seismic activity
Tokyo seems to be doing just fine at building millions of homes in mid and high rises capable of not letting an empty plastic bottle fall over during earthquakes that made me sit down.
True, but it is not just about that there are X million houses emtpy and Y million people homeless. It is also about location of those empty houses. That might not overlap with location of the homeless, and I guess we are not talking about forced relocation here. There is probably still a good overlap of locations of empty houses and homeless and that part needs fixing.
See: the Bay Area and most of LA absolutely suffocated by suburban sprawl. You could build higher density residential dwellings, but first you need to tear down a few existing homes, plus get it past all the NIMBYS whose property values might go down if there’s not hyperinflated demand.
Agreed, but the problem is that the ‘we’ in this scenario votes for this every two years. When both ruling parties tell us they’re capitalist, we need to believe them.
Maybe it would help to massively increase property taxes on all houses that aren’t the primary residence of their owners, and use the proceeds to build more houses
Sounds like it’s time to start burning shit down
Or just start squatting in the vacant properties.
