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Here in the Netherlands, the government agency for housing has the figures on how many second homes people own, but refuses to publish it.
Journalists have estimated that the number is about equal to the number of people looking for a house. About 400K on a population of 18M.
The scarcity is artificial.
I don't think owning a second home per se is wrong or evil. Many people can't afford buying a house due to the upfront costs. But owning a second home and leaving it empty for years? Owning multiple homes to use as Airbnbs in residential areas? I really wish this was regulated. But it will never be because there's big bucks being made there.
I'm even ok with them owning a second house - but I think simple, easily understood answers are what's called for in this day and age (nuance is so easily corrupted) so here's my pitch
You have a second house? If it's empty for 6 months, your taxes start going up. By a year it should be more then the house value rises, and it should just keep going up
Same with apartments and any property opening companies. Honestly, I'd be fine saying it all starts when your household owns at least three homes
You can surrender the house to the government to be rented at cost, maybe for a tax write-off for the first 10 years or something, otherwise it should just keep rising to insane levels.
I want people begging for renters. Developers should slash their prices to move units quickly - it'll incentivize more affordable housing. Hell, I want landlords so desperate they pay people to inhabit them for a fixed time period.
And that's why I like 3 - you had to move and your house isn't selling? I don't want to screw over individuals, there's easier people to. You have a vacation house? Fine, but if you move you better get your empty house sold.
It'll cause all kinds of problems, but we have empty homes and homeless people - that's just uncivilized
Unfortunately this won't solve the housing problem. It'll just cause the demolition of perfectly fine houses to avoid increasing costs and new homes would only be built if there are people that signed a tenancy agreement beforehand.
The market would shift from readily available but empty homes to yet to build homes.
There's also so much bureaucratic pushback to building new houses for all sorts of bullshit reasons. The scarcity is indeed artificial and this is the kind of corruption that we accuse 3d world countries of. Except here it's called "lobbying".
Related: the idea that everyone needs to work all the time isn't really true anymore. If we were in like 3000 bce in a small farming village outside Ur, yeah, people gotta pitch in so we don't get eaten by wildlife, the neighboring tribe, or whatever.
But in 2025ce, where so many jobs have so much filler nonsense? And when the rich can just live on investment income? No, the whole "work or starve" thing isn't needed anymore.
We should have basic income for all and public housing. Let people pursue what they want. Maybe it's art. Maybe they just want to take care of the local library. Maybe they just want to be a local barfly that keeps the tavern interesting. Who knows? But wage slavery needs to go.
when the rich can just live on investment income
How do you think they make that money? Primarily off of consumerism. If we all collectively decided to share what we have and stop buying what we don't need, there could be no passive income, not at the scale it exists today, anyways.
We also need to outlaw landlords. Owning land is not a job and it's certainly not a business.
Recommendation: the book Bullshit Jobs
I've heard of this one. Maybe I'll check it out.
The downside of reading a lot of depressing non fiction is I increasingly feel like I'm living in a cuckoo clock, and get frustrated with how everyone else seems oblivious and uncaring.
We haven't needed to work since the early 1900s. The labor movement was all about getting people to work less and ensuring everyone is taken care of. Consumerism was invented to fight back and has been winning ever since. People are animals and animals can be manipulated.
It doesn't blow my mind, it infuriates me
We don't have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem.
Resources are constantly being wasted to accelerate the wealth transfer up the chain.
We operate under the depression-era assumption that per-capita GDP is some kinda gold-standard metric for evaluating how well a country is doing economically. In reality per-capita GDP is just tracking the trash changing hands. We also overemphasize transactionality because of this. It's somehow much better from an "economic perspective" to have everyone buying new shirts every week even if it's the same people buying and then tossing the same fast fashion junk in the trash.
When you consider other metrics we could be judged by such as the OP is kinda pointing at here, our country looks way fucking worse on the leaderboard.
We ought to use the measures of the material conditions of our population to drive policy rather than how much currency has changed hands and how many worthless transactions have occurred.
And people think it's the fault of the poor that they don't have enough :)
That's capitalism baybe. The expectation of infinite growth in a finite system based around the infinite sales of infinite products that have a price because they say they are finite.
Brings to mind the barbecue speech
How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with.
First, I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are some devilish details.
Take a look at some pictures of Gary, Indiana. It's an entire city that's been mostly abandoned since the collapse of the industry that built it. There are entire boarded up neighborhoods, and some quite fine large, brick houses where wealthy people used to live. It's all just sitting there. I'm sure that Gary would love to have people start moving back in, and revive the city.
So, say Gary just eminent-domained all those properties, and said to America: you want a house? All you have to do is come, pick one, and move in. You live in it for 5 years, it's your's.
The problem is that it costs money to keep up a home. Home maintenance is stupid expensive, and most of these abandoned homes need repairs: new windows, new roofs, new water heaters, plumbing repairs, electrical repairs. Do you have any idea what a new window costs? And even if it's sweat equity, and you're able to repair a roof yourself, you still need materials. Where does this money come from?
Are the homeless in California going to move to Gary, IN? Are the homeless in Alabama? There are homeless employed folks, but they're tied to their locations by their jobs. They're not moving to Gary.
Finally, it's a truism that it's often less expensive to tear down a house in poor condition and build a new one than it is to renovate. If these people don't have the money to build a new house, how are they going to afford to renovate a vacant one.
The problem is that people need jobs to live in a house (unless someone else is paying for taxes, insurance, and maintenance). And the places with jobs aren't the places like Gary, that have a abundance of empty homes. All of those empty homes are in inconvenient places, where the industry and jobs they created dried up.
It may be that a well-funded organization could artificially construct a self-sustaining community built on the bones of a dead one. But I think it's oversimplifying to suggest that you can just take an empty home away from the owner (let's assume you can) and just stick homeless people in it and assume it'll work - that, even given a house, they'll be able to afford to keep it heated, maintained, powered, insured. Shit, even if you given them a complete tax exemption, just keeping a house is expensive.
I'm sure there are some minority of homeless for whom giving an abandoned home in the area they live would solve their problems. And I'm sure that, for a while at least, having a bigger box to live in would be an improvement for many, even if the box is slowly falling apart around them. But I think it's naive to be angry about the number of empty homes, and that homelessness could be solved by relocating the homeless to where these places are and assigning them a house - whatever state it's in.
We don't need to move them, there are vacant homes everywhere. Even in San francisco the residential vacancy rate is 6%. The unhoused in San francisco make up about 1% of the population, so assuming the unhoused population takes up the same amount of housing per person as the housed population, we could house every unhoused person here and still have 5% left over.
That's the worst case too, the rest of the country has a higher vacancy rate and a proportionally lower unhoused population.
We also dont have enough water, living on a enormous water planet. :)
Why so salty.
I dont think salt is an unsolvable problem. Its just that as usual, it needs to be profitable to solve it. Currently its just being used as a fake resource limitation. That problem would quickly be solved if humanity had to.
AFAIK salt is pretty hard to take out at a scale cause is really well dissolved. There are some methods available but seems they are energy intense.
Shout-out to too good to go - an app that aims to minimize food waste by letting restaurants and grocery stores sell "surprise bags" of food at 1/3 to 1/2 off!
Good mythical morning has a few episodes featuring these!
There's a house on my way to work that's vacant. I saw an ambulance there about two years ago; I'm betting that the owner died, because it's now entirely overgrown, with weeds and grass completely overtaking the yard and driveway.
How many of the 'empty houses' are places that were abandoned and are in such disrepair that they're not safe for habitation, and how many of them are places that are second houses and/or bank-owned rentals?
For reference, the house I live in right now was repo'd around 2010, and my partner and I bought it in 2018; it had been vacant for almost a decade, and required a lot of work, almost as much as it cost, to get it safe. And it still needs work; I need to shore up the floor that's sagging, and the exterior walls need to be opened up from the inside and be fully sealed b/c I can feel breezes inside when it's windy outside.