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16 millions vacant houses across the US, not counting the empty offices buildings. 11 millions houses empty in Europe. In both cases enough vacancy to houses the homeless population and more.
The biggest issue with homelessness isn't the lack of homes available to house people, it's the lack of mental health and addiction support
I'm sure having a home goes a long way towards improving your mental health when you go without a home for long enough.
This has always felt like one of those arguments that just kicks the can.
Yes, there are 100% some homeless people who are in such a bad place that they'd outright refuse a home even if you gave it to them free of charge (or would immediately sell it for drug money/burn it down because it's filled with alien Spyware or something), but I'd wager that if you actually gave a lot of these people a stable home, and food in their fridge so they weren't literally fighting for their lives on the street, they'd be able to self improve a lot more than people give them credit for.
A lot of homeless are just people who had one bad turn after another and are just unable to break the cycle because our system really isn't built to let them do so. I think we should also be providing mental Healthcare and addiction support to these people, but saying that should come before giving them a sense of stability and safety is ass backwards imo
Other countries are being more aggressive about providing housing for the unhoused. Notably, Finland has been putting people in sponsored housing since the late 80's. The net result is a rapidly decreasing unhoused population. Most of the people who are given homes get on their feet, get the kinds of support they need, and reach a good place in life. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-homelessness
Many articles title it that Finland has "solved" homlessness, which isn't 100% true, but the approach has been wildly successful compared to most other nation's strategies.
And rampant real estate speculation
A big thing is where are those homes located? Are they near social services? Are they near jobs? Skills training? Is putting a homeless person in them with no income going to allow said homeless person to build a life?
Most homeless go to cities where there are social services, and lots of people around so they can beg for an income. Most empty houses are not in cities.
Yes, many of those homes are located in or near cities. Of course more public transportation is needed.
... isn't that the point?
Right?! Love how the article frames it as a bad thing because it doesn't make sense from a capitalist standpoint.
It certainly isn’t capitalist to have such an insane gap between offer and supply. If lack of offer is a problem, the issues with such enormous oversupply are even greater. Just wasteful. Damaging to the environment. And introduces a lot of economic woes.
Oversupply of life saving goods is a good thing. Only under capitalism is it bad, which is why we have so many preventable deaths and deaths of poverty. Overbuilding housing and making it available to everyone in anticipation of localized population booms or migrations is exactly what the government should be doing.
Ah yes, because housing as a right rather than an investment is a bad thing.
Who do you think built all of those houses? Capitalists who were speculating on real estate.
It is a bad thing! How are investors holding on to dozens of empty units at ridiculous prices supposed to get a return on investment if the market's oversaturated with living spaces?
Looks like we're gonna have to start tearing them down to reduce supply.
It's a problem for people who indebted themselves to buy those homes with a valuation based on scarcity. Also a problem for the real estate Chinese companies, sector which represents a quarter of Chinese economy.
That's a good thing, right? It means there is no homelessness in the entire country, right?
Correct
Not so great if large aspects of your economic growth is tied to the real estate market. Theoretically the value of property is tied in some way to scarcity. If there is an abundance of housing, then there's not a real reason for property value to mature.
If the rate of maturity is less than the rate of this inflation, then you are no longer creating an investment, you are creating debt. If a property investment group, a private bank, or state bank has over invested too heavily in developing the real estate market....... there's a pretty good chance that it's going to have a hard time remaining in solvency.
This is an example of why a lot of people accuse the CCP of giving up on communism after the Deng reforms. Satiating the needs of the market too often conflicts with the needs of the people.
Theoretically in a planned economy you would be correct. There's no motivation too build too many homes, nor is there is there a scarcity of homes. Both scenario are conditions of a capitalist market reacting to the perceived needs of the consumer or the market.
Real estate speculators make too many buildings, property values fall, people can buy homes, and everyone wins. Right? Oh, except for real estate speculators, but who cares about them anyway.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has a severe housing crisis and there is a global shortage of concrete sand aggregate.
The problem with China’s real estate market is that it’s entirely built on false promises and leveraged debt.
The government provides cheap loans to citizens to buy homes they will never live. All in an effort to drive the country’s GDP… but eventually you will either:
This article has nothing to do with unhoused people, nor an overvalued housing market pushing out middle class buyers. The economics of the Chinese market are completely dissimilar from the western (US particularly) markets.
It’s entirely about how the Chinese government has an unsustainable market segment dedicated to building things that people don’t want or need… other than to have wealth on paper.
The root cause that all comments here in Lemmy miss is the Chinese approach to tax funding, which is entirely built on cities and provinces being expected to generate tax income through land sales to property developers, and then public officials competency and rise inside the party being measured by the size of that tax income generated trough land sale.
China needs to adopt a western style of income and consumption taxation if they don't have one but I understand that internal enforcements is very lax (to prevent popular protests) and corruption (that ends up siphoning off any revenue raised through taxes).
In short, that housing stock will remain unused and, without maintenance and continued use, will only deteriorate over time, leaving cities with a terrible burdensome legacy
The CCP basically "encouraged" those with capital to park it in these massive make-work projects knowing full well that any real demand-based natural economic equilibrium wouldn't support that housing inventory. They pumped up their economic numbers using tools like this, but like all centrally managed economies they are running out of levers to pull. It's going to be ugly when this stuff all comes to a head.
How? A 65 million unit surplus is more or less in line with other countries: 65/1400 = 5%. At an average family household size of 3, that gives an aggregate household vacancy rate of (up to) 15% (ignoring, of course, that not everyone who owns a home has a family). This also ignores how things like second homes, vacation homes, and excess rural housing stock is counted (given that, y'know, China has had a massive rural-to-urban migration over the past few decades).
The US census reports a vacancy rate of about 10%, and even New York has a vacancy rate of 3%.
Approximately 89.6 percent of the housing units in the United States in the second quarter 2023 were occupied and 10.4 percent were vacant.
Didn't we just come off a decade of record low interest rates? Are we all fucked?
If only they could send some to Canada. Probably the best ones, nobody's buying a house without insulation or functioning taps here.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
China's real-estate struggles rose to prominence in 2021, when industry giant Evergrande became the most indebted company in the world and defaulted.
At the time, there were at least 65 million vacant properties in the country, which would have been enough to house the entire population of France, Insider previously reported.
City's like Shenyang, in the country's northeast, were envisaged as new hot spots for China's ultra-rich, with flashy European-style villas.
Today, farmers have taken over the ghost town, plowing the land and letting cattle roam free around the empty mansions.
The government has since enacted efforts to move some of the country's top schools to the region, which has led to an influx of families and high-achieving students, bringing the population and real-estate prices up, Japanese publication Nikkei Asia reported in 2021.
Despite these efforts, Inner Mongolia, the autonomous region of China where Ordos is located, is still one of the slowest-growing areas of the country, per the report.
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good bot!
And yet China keeps populating these "ghost towns" over and over again. Almost like the term is nothing more than a xenophobic, alarmist misnomer.
If this was five years ago, I'd agree with you. But the Chinese national government has been clamping down on new construction for the past few years. China is also experiencing almost no population growth.
There was always going to be a time for China to stop building housing because the supply would eventually outstrip demand. Now seems to be near that time.