huginn , 14 days ago

The only statistic that matters is sold not occupied and even that is only useful if it excludes houses that just haven’t been moved into yet.

The majority of those figures are just showing that houses are unoccupied in resort towns because there’s nothing there half the year or that houses sit empty for a month while a new renter is sorted out or a new owner is moving in.

We don’t need to shove the homeless into a remote resort town where they have no access to services - we need more housing in our cities where support networks can help those in need.

The fact is that there arent enough houses to house every homeless person in the USA and maintain sufficient housing stock for people to move houses.

Anything below a 5% vacancy rate is considered a housing shortage - it indicates there’s too much demand for housing and not enough supply.

Very few American cities are sitting at or above 5% vacancy.