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.
Have these homeless people been offered houses in small towns and they refused? Feels like a lot of assumptions are being made here
… 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.
I mean, maybe a bit of a buffer, but China was pretty much just building them endlessly. A lot of people were evicted and wetlands filled for these (bad, cut-corner) apartment buildings to go up and then sit totally empty.
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 certainly isn’t capitalist to have such an insane gap between offer and supply
Sure it is! Capitalists just do it in the opposite direction; keep supply low so prices stay high.
No, that’s an effect of collusion and cartelization of the economy. It’s because you have very few actors supplying the product and the barriers of creating a similar product are too high, so new competitors cannot access the market. Then the current suppliers can sit on the product and wait for it to be at the right price, as long as it doesn’t go to waste.
As you can see, all of this screens about real estate:
- Cartelization/collusion: The aren’t that many companies that have properties on sale
- High cost to enter: Building is pricey, and it depends on the location of the property more than anything. So a building in one neighborhood is not a direct replacement of a building in another neighborhood.
- Real estate does not go to waste. Unless bad luck or poor choices, your building should work fine for a couple of generations. And worst case scenario, the land already has a price.
This is the time when governments should intervene and come up with a proposal to solve the cartelization.
No, that’s an effect of collusion and cartelization of the economy.
That’s just capitalism honey
Yes and no. Capitalism without regulations may bring this kind of issues. But capitalism with regulations shouldn’t. The issue is that the required regulations are not being applied or do not exist.
We should not blame or put the weight of the issue in capitalism, when we clearly know we don’t live in a perfect capitalistic world, and very few markets are like that. The issue is with politicians.
Capitalism destroys its own regulations because politicians are for sale! You’re acting like politics and markets are different, but they’re interconnected at their very core.
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Yes, of course we do. We just need politicians willing to do that. I thinks that’s the most difficult part.
Oops, the businesses bought the politicians and now they won’t pass anti-trust legislation. Who could have seen this coming???
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Uh, that organisation is generally City Hall.
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“Planned by the libs”, as if the “libs” were a single entity that have a homogeneous plan. Let’s stop giving entity to stuff that never existed and realise that there is a structural problem that occurred because of bad management of our economy and policies. Because we had mediocre actors and in some cases actors with bad faith.
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Are you making up a special magical definition for “libs”? Good luck with that.
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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.
Sounds to me like China is trying to solve both of those problems by lowering property scarcity - if this stays controlled it will make properties cheaper so people don’t need to acquire as much debt and it will shrink the real estate sector. Since this housing is built through centralized control and not a market, it should be totally under control.
Obviously something unexpected could happen that blindsides the Party, but it looks like politics is in command and everything is proceeding as expected.
Obviously something unexpected could happen that blindsides the Party, but it looks like politics is in command and everything is proceeding as expected.
I take it you didn’t read the article.
A former Chinese government official said the country’s entire population of 1.4 billion wouldn’t be enough to fill all of its empty houses, Reuters reported, citing a video from the state news agency China News Service. 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.
To me, this seems wasteful. I’m not very familiar with the Chinese real estate market however.
There should always be a reserve supply of vacant properties to give people freedom of movement between regions and cities.
This might be overkill:
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.
65M is what percentage of 1.4Bn? It’s about 5%.
5% oversupply is pretty reasonable, especially given that the housing isn’t fungible and the populations are more mobile than the houses are.
That doesn’t actually mean there are 65 million surplus properties. A vacant house isn’t an unnecessary house. Children move out all the time, families sometimes break up, Chinese citizens currently living overseas or in Europe return home, etc.
I bet there’s actually math for this - I wonder if anyone has calculated the optimal amount of vacancies?
That doesn’t actually mean there are 65 million surplus properties. A vacant house isn’t an unnecessary house.
That is a very good point. I still find it hard to believe that they are making the best use of labor and materials with situations like this:
Ordos, near the border with Mongolia, was meant to hold over 1 million people and become a cultural and economic hub. But by 2016, its population was only around 100,000, and it has been described as “the largest ghost town in the world.”
That’s a good thing, right? It means there is no homelessness in the entire country, right?
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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.
In a planned economy, it wouldn’t be unexpected to over-build. In fact, it perfectly makes sense, same as we would over produce a small surplus of anything. Housing isn’t ten I to create, and so having reserves ready for use when they’re needed in the future is a good thing. It may be bad from capitalism perspective, because you aren’t getting a great return on the investment yet. But from a planned economy perspective it’s good.
In a planned economy, it wouldn’t be unexpected to over-build. In fact
I wouldn’t call that over building though, and that wouldn’t explain hundreds of millions of extra homes. Building that aren’t being used begin to break down quite rapidly.
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 why Canada has a housing crisis.
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!
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And yet China keeps populating these “ghost towns” over and over again. Almost like the term is nothing more than a xenophobic, alarmist misnomer.
Holy shit everyone I think the MC’s lie from Goodbye, Lenin is about to come true!
