More than 300,000 housing units in New York City sat vacant. However, the Big Apple’s total vacancy rate of 8.3% in 2022 fell slightly from five years earlier (9.7%). Meanwhile, San Francisco had over 52,000 vacant units in 2022 for a 12.7% vacancy rate.
Turns out nobody wants to live in checks notes New York City or San Fransisco.
a significant fraction of them aren’t where people want (or need)
There are definitely large numbers of vacant units in areas that were de-industrialized or hit with natural disasters. However, speculators moving in and gobbling up the properties at their bargain basement rates, then squatting on them to drive up the overall value of real estate in the area, result in artificially high real estate rates across these neighborhoods. Even in places with ostensibly low demand for housing, the prices remain higher than in historical periods of high demand.
Suburbs and ghost towns and remote regions pushes the average up.
Over-development in less accessible places can make neighborhoods unattractive due to the commute. But the solution to this problem is often to improve mass transit in these neighborhoods and develop local public services (schools, post offices, grocery stores, etc) at their centers. Then do the one thing that Americans hate and fear more than anything - BRING IN THE MIGRANTS. Populate the neighborhoods with large socially cohesive cohorts of new people and energize the neighborhoods with public works spending.
This creates a virtuous cycle of economic growth and development that brings in still more people and creates new demand for more goods and services. This is exactly what big midwestern towns did to revitalize in the wake of deindustrialization. Chattanooga, Tennessee installed public Gigabit internet and became the center of a Tennessee tech boom. Detroit accumulated a network of art collectives in its low rent housing and reinvented itself as a cultural center. Atlanta, Georgia is enjoying an enormous economic expansion thanks to new federally subsidized battery plants in the city.
When public policy identifies a housing surplus, policymakers can create a virtuous cycle of development by building new business capacity in the immediate vicinity. Then you solve joblessness, homelessness, and a stagnant economy in one go.