Sooner or later you're bound to see somebody

[conuly]

or more like several somebodies proclaim that there are more homes in the USA than homeless people.

I have no idea where they get this little factoid, but it's a pretty useless tidbit.

First, it's unclear how they're defining "homeless", or if they've given any thought as to how they should define it. Are we counting people who are chronic couchsurfers because they can't find an affordable place to stay, but who technically have a friend's roof over their head every night, even if they have to hustle week from week to find another friend so as not to wear out their welcome? Are we counting families who have split the kids up among relatives because Mom and Dad can't find a place with enough space for them AND the kids, but technically everybody is housed? Are we counting people paying exorbitant fees week to week to rent a motel room because they can't get the cash together for first and last month rent plus a security deposit on an actual apartment? How about families living "doubled up", as they say, sharing an apartment with two or more families that isn't big enough, really, for one - each family crammed into a bedroom and timesharing the bathroom and kitchen?

Or are they only thinking of the long term homeless who literally live on the streets or occasionally in shelters?

Secondly, while I agree that any solution to homelessness starts with giving people homes, the actual existence of houses does no good if they aren't where the people are! If my job is in NYC, and my kids go to school in NYC, and I'm hooked up to the social programs in NYC, and my family is in the greater NYC area, it does no good to tell me that there are hundreds of empty houses in Detroit. Even if I could get there, what would I do once I did? And at least Detroit is a city. Do we seriously expect the urban homeless population to decamp to the thinning out rural counties of America? Would they even be welcome, no matter how many homes they live in?

Utterly useless statement, there are more homes than homeless. Utterly, utterly useless.

Comments

[ex_inklessej388]

I think pushing out of the built up urban areas is part of the solution to homelessness. Inevitably the price of housing rises as we stack more and more of these spaces on top of one another. Not to mention that rarely are any of these new condos and highrises affordable for people. But there are a whole whack of other things that have to happen to make rural life more palatable for people. Investment in public transportation that is efficient and affordable is a huge start. A lot of smaller communities around large urban areas can be revitalized with investment in light rail, but governments need to make the investment and see the connection between providing affordable housing, access to urban networks (the everything in greater NYC area example you give) and pushing out of the desire to build up and make money.

This is coming from a Canadian living in a part of the country where homelessness and affordable housing are a MAJOR issue that is not getting the action it needs from all levels of government.

[conuly]

I disagree. I think building more units in built up areas is key. American cities are just not very dense, and while I understand that increasing supply can in some cases paradoxically increase demand, when it comes to urban housing demand has outstripped supply for a long time.

I also think we need to make our inner suburbs much denser. Smaller homes, smaller plots, more two and three family houses. Our families are smaller than in the 1950s, so why are modern houses bigger?

[mindstalk]

Most of the US isn't even remotely built up. Housing prices in Boston or the Bay Area are increasing not because of stacking but because more people want to live there now; price of housing is increasing without any stacking whatsoever. Pretty much all the booming areas have been adding 3-6 times as many jobs as housing units for the last 2-3 decades. It's supply and demand.

What is allowed to be built is (a) limited (b) high-rise and (c) required to have expensive parking. All three elements raise the price.

Most US urban area is zoned for detached single-family houses. There is no stacking, no apartments allowed; black/poor people might move in!

"a whole whack of other things that have to happen to make rural life more palatable for people. Investment in public transportation that is efficient and affordable is a huge start"

People are trying to move to select cities because that's where the jobs are.

You need density to have efficient and affordable public transit.

[loligo]

But there are a whole whack of other things that have to happen to make rural life more palatable for people.

Well, there's really only one big one: well-paying jobs.

I live in a *slightly* thinning out rural county, adjacent to some really thinning out rural counties, and I can tell you that many of the people who are leaving the area would NOT be leaving if they could still make a decent living here. Most of the jobs that have been lost in the past 40 years are in agriculture or mining, but several pretty big factories have closed, too. Then there's all the retail and service jobs that used to support those people.

Yes, for sure, if you want to attract new people to a rural area, you need to provide them with some of the nice things that larger places have, like transit. (And heck, those of us who are already here would love some transit, too!) But it wouldn't take much to *retain* the people who already have roots here and already love it.

[neotoma]

No, the price of housing doesn't rise because of density, it rises because of desirability.

Where I live, the price differential between comparable living spaces within easy walking distance of a subway station and not within easy walking distance are significant. Home prices can be 8% or more, and apartments are even more variable.

Also, dense housing let's there be enough people in a small area to support things like mass transit, quirky little bookshops, and various small businesses that rely on foot traffic.

[lavendertook]

So agreed!

Add to your list people living in cars not because they love living in cars, and people living at campsites, out in the woods, empty lots, under urban bridges in tents, and campers and not because they love camping and mobile living.

And yes, tiny houses are adorable, but having lived in mobile homes, and especially an efficiency for many more years than I wanted to, I can attest that minimalist living is a luxury only for the wealthy who can count on picking up what they need at whatever cost when disaster, illness, disability, and caretaker responsibilities hit.

[conuly]

Oh, gosh yes. And people who put on a good face for family and especially their kids that this is their choice.

[crystalpyramid]

Yeah there are a ton of useless homes built in places that don't have the wealth to justify the highways they need to survive. Especially pre-recession. But I don't think shipping people to e.g. suburban Las Vegas is a good idea...

[maia]

Agreed!

ETA: OTOH, in NYC where so much real estate belongs to the super-rich, there are so many palatial "homes" that are seldom occupied. I've often thought we ought to give the owners a choice: either pay a VERY high tax on your unoccupied property, or allow the city to house the homeless there whenever you're away.

[conuly]

YES TAX UNOCCUPIED PROPERTY.

INCLUDING RETAIL SPACES.

[calimac]

I've seen it brought up, not in a stupid "Let's put all the homeless into those empty houses" sense, but more in a ways of pointing out that the houses aren't where the homeless are, so this is fncked up in more than one sense.

[conuly]

Brought up that way, not so bad. Brought up in this way, lazy thinking.

[angelofthenorth]

OK. In the UK this actually has meaning. We have a major problem of people hoarding houses in areas people want to live and using them as either air bnb or keeping them empty.
We also have a legal definition of homelessness that encompasses all the groups mentioned.

I know NYC and slc have similar issues of houses that need to be brought back into circulation because they've been case studies for homelessness how to and how not to.

[conuly]

Hoarding homes is disgusting, I quite agree. There ought to be a tax for unoccupied properties.

We also have a legal definition of homelessness that encompasses all the groups mentioned.

And does everybody scrupulously use the legal definition at all times?

[bitterlawngnome]

Vancouver BC has a tax on empty housing, and while it's only recent it does seem to have made the city less attractive for people overseas buying housing to hold and flip later. Slightly. Wait and see what it does in the long haul. The developers of course are all screaming because now omg who will buy their unlivable million-dollar shoeboxes? and threatening (if that's the word) to stop doing what they do. Nobody has actually raised this issue, developers building crap "housing" units that are designed solely to look good in the sales brochure but god forbid you try raising kids in them or etc. ... another issue to add to your list of frustrations.

[conuly]

God forbid you try to live in them. I've seen how some of these houses are made, and it's shoddy all around.

[nodrog]

If they’d said, “potential homes,” I would agree.  It’s wrong and tragic, that it’s cheaper and easier to break new ground than to refurbish existing buildings, making for more and more suburban sprawl while leaving a necrotic ring of empty buildings to deteriorate.  How many people could live in any empty Rite-Aid? Let ’em!

[low_delta]

300,000,000 people in the US. If there were an average of 3 people per home (just to pull a number out of the sky for discussion purposes) that would be over 100M homes.

So these people wouldn't see a problem until there were over 100 million homeless people.

[mindstalk]

I think conuly left out the word 'vacant'. The usual claim I see is that there are more vacant homes than homeless people.

[thewayne]

Not to mention the houses in Detroit and elsewhere are not fit to live in and require massive refurb.

[ayebydan]

♥ Agreed and it is the same in the UK. There are 15 empty homes in a little village near me but that little village is connected via public transport by a bus that goes twice per day. And those twice-daily bus routes don't mate up with say, other buses or trains to urban centres with jobs.

[silveradept]

Indeed. It's no good to say "this place has plenty of dwellings" if the reason those dwellings exist is because the people can't live there, due to lack of transit and employment.

I would personally enjoy seeing the super-rich and their corporations taxed at a rate that is essentially "so we can build the infrastructure and housing for all the jobs that you are bringing to this space" so we don't have people suddenly priced out of their space because Bezos decided he wanted a warehouse or a data center there.

[mindstalk]

Taxes won't solve the problem that it's mostly illegal to add new housing, due to zoning. Let alone adding cheap housing.

[mindstalk]

"Because there are at least three off-street parking spaces per car in the United States, there are at least 990 square feet of off-street parking space per car. In comparison, there are about 800 square feet of housing space per person in the United States. The area of off-street parking per car is thus larger than the area of housing per human."

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/09/parking-lot-urban-planning-transit-street-traffic-congestion/598504/

[conuly]

That's insane, if true.

[elf]

I see that a lot, too. And yeah. The statistics don't indicate where the people are vs where the homes are, nor which people or what kind of homes they're counting.

We need to eliminate single-family zoning in most, maybe all, of the US. Definitely get rid of it in large dense cities.

Allow 4-bedroom houses to contain 7 people who may or may not be related. Allow three small housing units on a single plot of land. And that's before we get into, "gov't-run free dorm centers" with no restrictions other than basic safety features.

[cynthia1960]

And when these single family dwellings are filled with people who use cars to get to work/etc. because public transit doesn't meet their needs, and cars are prioritized, things get worse. I grew up in a 1961 vintage tract house in Fremont (southeast Bay Area). At one point in time in the early 80s, there were six cars being actively used by our family of eight; only my grandma and great-grandma didn't drive. We built an addition to house them when they moved in.

This is really screwed up in multiple dimensions. Fremont is still horrible to get around without a car decades later. I'm in downtown San José now, transit options are better here but that isn't saying much. My wife and I figure we'd be saving ~$650 a month if we got rid of our only remaining car (electric not gas burning). We are seriously considering what it would take to go car-free.

[cynthia1960]

I saw something recently to the effect that most newly built single family dwellings in the US basically are of such crap quality that they will not outlast their mortgage. So all these fucking ugly McMansions are even more craptastic than we thought.

I'm a 4th generation Bay Area native. We have to really increase the density of housing here in the core and quit prioritizing cars. Add yearly fires, our fucked up electrical grid, and oh goddess messed up transit options that keep people in cars. I am absolutely fine with living densely.

[dogstar]

well, and like, it's SUCH a problem that differs in different areas.

I live on a road that goes up to a national historical site and literally no where else- 40 miles to a dead end. We get a fair amount of traffic during the tourist season, and of course other people live up here (mostly on what are called 'inholdings' - they were bits that were privately owned when the national forest and BLM lands were created; some were farms, some were homesteaded things, and most (like my property) were mining claims originally. There is legit no way to affordably do mass transit up here- there's just not enough people. Biking isn't practical (even if we had a dedicated bike lane- which we don't- it's very steep, very curvy, and flatly dangerous)- a couple of the local horse folks joke about riding down the continental divide trail (which has one trailhead right by my house and another down closer to town- except that it crosses a mountain to do that. It'd take about a day in each direction.) Our local transit WILL bring folks up or down if you're elderly or disabled and you schedule it in advance, but it's M-Sat, 8-6PM only.

Hilariously, our tiny town adjacent to the bigger town (current population 247 for the first, 8K for the second) DID have a railroad that came up here from 1880 something until the silver mines were mostly played out (like 1912ish? Exact date is escaping me.) But that industry's entirely gone- it's all cattle operations, retirees, and people like me who just like being remote and having room for the doggos. (Related note- for those of us who are Serious Dog People, more and more areas- even rural areas- are doing some really onerous things with zoning and pet/animal limits and spay/neuter requirements.)

[rfmcdonald]

This is a terrible crisis globally that no one is dealing with well.

Mind, I think the statement can also work as a description of the absurdity of the situation, its imbalances.