Rich like to collect shit and then hide it.
My simple solution ( although there is no simple answer to this complex question) is to put a 1% on the landlord for every empty home. After 2 years it goes doubles.
So if your a home owner with a second or even a third home you should be able to cover the cost or at least until you get someone in. But if you happen to own 50 plus over priced properties, you can either lower the price,or sell the house.
Properties should not be investment
IMHO, the answer is simple.
No corporation may own more than X single family or multifamily (up to 4 family per building) housing units, other than for occupation by its employees, for more than 120 days. Any housing units owned for more than 120 days are taxed at a rate of 50% of their fair market value per year.
Watch how fast companies like Zillow that tried to get rich fast by ‘playing the housing market’ dump houses on the market.
I’m invested in real estate, and I want this to happen even though it’ll hurt me economically. Real estate is horrifically overvalued, and corporations owning huge numbers of single family homes / small multifamily homes are a big part of why.
I’m all for investing to make money. Some things should be considered public resources, not vehicles for investment. Land and health are among them.
Why should corporations be able to own housing at all? They don’t live in them.
I’ve been thinking along these lines for years. Contrary to what is often said, about landlords being leeches, I believe they provide a service. Not everybody can afford or wants to buy a house, but renting should be affordable.
Land, however, is a finite resource, and should be taxed accordingly, to redistribute wealth, and normalize the market.
I find people who invest on housing as a means to enhance their retirement, for example, fine.
However, hoarding and speculation that leads to inflated markets is not.
A proggresive taxation on individual owners, say 10-15% on the first 3 properties (maybe one or two could be second residences, why not), 20% on 5-10, 50% on 10-20, for example (I’m throwing numbers around) would make hoarding a diminishing returns game.
Businesses should have much higher brackets, on residential. Commercial should be taxed, but less so.
Empty residential should be taxed punitively, and also progressively, and after a certain period, made available to municipalities for social housing.
Capitalism is good, when there are effective checks.
Social housing should be a priority.
There are tons of ways to promote a sane and socially responsible market.
I believe in capitalism, with effective checks, and redistribution of wealth, progressively.
It’s completely written by AI, but ChatGPT makes a good point.
No…. The immigrants stole them all
This article claims a lot of these are foreclosures and banks don’t want to be landlords
Massive property tax increase. Owner-occupants are exempted from that tax.
As soon as a bank initiates foreclosure proceedings, they owe the full, non-exempt tax rate. That stick gives them a strong incentive to work with their borrower.
That article also talks about a lot of the properties being tear downs. It’s easy to say that a homeless person would find just about anything a step up, but realistically it has to be habitable, salable, maintainable. No one would want the liability of a below standard house, nor the PR hit of giving a junk house
That’s what I was thinking, too. The article says 116 houses per homeless person in Detroit. Has this person ever been to Detroit? Vacant houses there aren’t even safe to look at.
I’ve been homeless. Give me a shit house I can call mine and let me work to improve it. Let me put money into replacing the pipes and removing the mold instead of into rent. With the prices landlords are charging these days, it would be easy.
landlords
the easy way to solve this is TO GIVE THE DAMNED HOUSES AWAY instead of retaining ownership of property that could house people. don’t want to be landlords? give it the fuck away
Corollary: this is also why we have squatters rights.
throughout the US?
if so, they don’t seem to be used successfully that I see; really the only squatters I’ve encountered were the pack of meth heads who moved into a neighbors house while they were working overseas. claimed they had a lease, even. And even they were gone in under a week.
just curious, thanks.
throughout the US?
Well The US is a patchwork of laws, so mileage may vary.
Still, perhaps we need to strengthen them. They are in the spirit of “this is who actually lives and contributes here”
Squatters shouldn’t have rights wtf. That’s not their property, lol it’s like lemme me just steal some shit from the store, they’re not using it.
There was a case study about how bizarre squatter rights existed in NY if the owner was away for 30 days and there so many cases of primary residence people going on extended vacation, and coming back and then they become homeless because some asshole just decided to move in until the court finally reviews these frivelous cases.
There are major things wrong with housing, but squatter rights are effectively allowing you to steal from others. They should look into limiting hoarding and lvt which has been shown to be more effective in places like Singapore.
Squatters shouldn’t have rights wtf. That’s not their property, lol it’s like lemme me just steal some shit from the store, they’re not using it.
If the owners don’t figure that someone moved in on the order of years then clearly they don’t care either. Thus the squatters have a right to claim the property.
As other two have said. The carrying costs for banks is just too low to incentivize liquidity in housing supply. Put them on the market and watch home prices and rent fall
I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
The problem is resource hoarding. Regulate the real estate monopolies. Stricter bans on AirBnBs and second vacation homes. Rent control properties. And renovate buildings that aren’t up to code.
Outside of extremely dense cities, it’s never, ever been a population issue. It’s a class issue.
I really don’t see how building more houses/units is not the solution, at least in some cases. I live in a VHCOL area and we straight up have a housing shortage for a variety of reasons.
Who needs a Bitcoin to live? Nobody. But the price of a Bitcoin is still 90,000 dollars. People aren’t living in their bitcoins, they want Bitcoins because other people want them. That’s why they’re expensive.
A house is like a Bitcoin that you need to live. Rich people are hoarding houses because other rich people want them, the same as Bitcoins. The problem is everyone needs a house. So we need to ban rich people from hoarding them somehow. Then the price will go down.
Massively increase property taxes. Exempt owner-occupants from those increases.
You want a second home, you’re going to be paying the full, punitive tax rate on one of them.
I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
I mean, it’s also been said that a lot of these empty houses are in rural/suburban neighborhoods outside of dying industrial centers. We’re effectively talking about “Ghost Towns”, with no social services and a deteriorating domestic infrastructure, that people are deliberately abandoning.
And we’re stacking that up against the homeless encampments that appear in large, dense, urban environments where social services are (relatively) robust and utilities operate at full capacity around the clock.
Picking people up from under the I-10 overpass and moving them to
doesn’t address homelessness as a structural problem. It just shuttles people around the state aimlessly and hopes you can squirrel them away where your voters won’t see them anymore.
At some point, you absolutely do need to build more apartment blocks and rail corridors and invest in local/state/federal public services again, such that you can gainfully employ (or at least comfortably retire) people with no future economic prospects. You can’t just take folks out to shacks in the boonies and say “Homelessness Resolved!”
Sounds like all those places need are people to live in them.
It’s a win-win.
They need economic activity to be livable. Shoving broke people onto a reservation doesn’t accomplish that.
They create the economic activity.
More people living in an area means there’s more to do and more people to do it.
On average, each additional person contributes more than they take out.
They create the economic activity.
You have to go back and actually read Kapital.
More people living in an area means there’s more to do and more people to do it.
Visit a refugee camp and explain that to the locals
…But nobody wants to live there.
You could give a bunch of homeless people housing, but there’s simply no structure around it. They have no money, and there’s no jobs. There’s no services around. They won’t be much better off than homeless in a big city tbh. Might be WORSE off.
There needs to be available housing near the places where there’s actually things to do, jobs to hold, services to use.
Worst part is, I bet a LOT of those ghots towns are suburban, not urban - so it makes it more difficult and expensive to build up a new community there. Everything is spaced out
A lot of those places suck and they’re not going to turn into vibrant cultural centers with social services quickly.
It won’t happen overnight.
If homeless people would prefer living in tents under highways, that’s their choice.
Stalin thought Siberia needed a lot of people living there. Look how that turned out.
Forgive my ignorance; I don’t know much about Siberia other than it is desolate and not much fun. How did that turn out?
You need jobs near those places first. The locations are dying because of lack of industry.
The people who move there will create jobs and demand.
That’s really not how it works. If you’re homeless you’re not in a position to be a job creator.
More people living in a location means there is more work to be done and more people to do it.
Each additional person, on average, can contribute more than they take out.
More people living in a location means there is more work to be done and more people to do it.
If that were universally applicable the towns wouldn’t be dying to begin with. The houses are empty because there’s a lack of available work.
Homeless people, on average, contribute less to society than housed people, on average. Generally multiple societal structural failures and bad luck are major contributions to a person ending up homeless, but their own genetic- and nuture-driven characteristics play a role, too, and having a higher physical and mental disability burden than the average human is common.
Also, living remotely often means subsistence is a major part of how people get on, and subsistence is an intensely knowledge- and skill-based task highly specific to locale. Hunting in rural Alaska is not immediately transferable to hunting in Greenland, and dumping someone in rural Montana is not going to poof make them an expert gatherer.
Just one more suburb bro I swear, it’s all we need just one more and it’ll be fixed
I’ve said the same thing. More housing will just be bought by more speculators. I also think a massive tax on owning more than 5 properties would be helpful as well. Put the revenue from that into affordable housing subsidies.
If you build enough housing it gets back into being economically competitive for the average person to own their home. Speculators can speculate until it doesn’t make sense any more.
We got into the current situation because we slowed way down on building homes.
It’s also the huge amount of housing that’s built that’s not affordable. We have had 5 neighborhoods built within 4 miles of my house over the past 5 years. Nothing is below 500k starting price.
The alternative is that nothing gets built and people compete for the existing stock which drives up prices anyway
Either take your 500k house or be happy on the street, there are no other options.
Or, now hear me out, we limit profit on things like this.
that’s because you can’t build homes for cheaper than that.
developers aren’t going to charge 300K for a home that cost them 400K to build
They actually can build homes cheaper than that, there’s a certain price point where they feel they’re making the kind of profit they want which is basically the cost of a older home profit-wise. There’s a recent article that came out that I’m can’t find right now but I read it just a couple months ago that talked about the 400 to $500,000 price range is the profit margin that builders want to make. That means they’re probably making 20 to 30% profit. And while they can build cheaper homes they make less profit so they are not motivated to.
I know it’s not going to happen under this regime but it seems like the solution is to offer tax breaks, subsidies, or whatever we think might give the developers some incentive to build lower income housing.
OK. you go develop those homes then.
since you’re such an expert and seem to think a 10% margin is totally worthwhile?
I run a company, and it often is. Think about it this way. If you sell a 250k home,10% would be 25k. A developer often sells an entire neighborhood, so let’s say conservatively 30 homes. That’s 750,000$. If that’s not enough profit to keep building, well, you now know the problem with our society.
The land is expensive. Every time you buy and build or rebuild you want to make a profit off of your investment and effort so it goes up. Even if the structure is crap and you intend to tear it down and rebuild the seller still expects to be paid for the structure. The only way to make land more affordable is to build upwards and make condos/apts and increase the number of residents per unit area.
It doesn’t need to be an either-or situation. We can attack the problem from multiple sides, since there’s isn’t a silver bullet. New housing absolutely has to be part of it, but obviously it’s not super helpful if the new stock isn’t affordable or practical for average people.
Counterproductive regulations (restrictive zoning, vetocracy setups) have prevented environmentally sensible and affordable housing from being added in sufficient quantities in most of the US for a long time. We have more people living in smaller households than we used to; it just doesn’t math without adding new stock.
New construction is always more expensive. We should keep building anyway. The new construction of today becomes more affordable over time.
We also need way more investment in mental health and rehab services.
Fixing the supply problem fixes the hoarding problem. Housing is an attractive investment because it’s scarce. Once you build enough, investors will invest in something else.
Building more housing is the solution, even if those homes largely go to the upper middle class and wealthy. Building new homes primarily for well off people isn’t a historic anomaly, it’s the norm. If you’re already building a house, it doesn’t take that much more to add some luxury features to make it appeal to the high end of the market. This is how it’s always been. Historically, the affordable housing of today is the luxury housing of yesterday.
Preventing new home construction doesn’t prevent neighborhoods from gentrifying. You just end up with yuppies living in newly renovated former tenements.
seriously. poor people don’t buy new homes. rich people do. i grew up poor. every house we lived in was 30+ years old. poor people buy homes that are old.
the issue is there are no more old homes anymore because we don’t build enough new homes. so now rich people buy old homes and push our the poor people who can’t afford any home.
people like me, making 150K and now going into poor communities and buying up the homes for ourselves because we can’t afford anything newer. all the old homes in the richer towns are crazy expensive, and the new ones are 2x the cost of the old ones.
new constructed home in my city is about 2-3million. a 50 year old house is like 1-1.5 million. a newly constructed home in a poor shit down is 500K. a old home in a shit town is like 350K. I can afford a 350K house. i can’t afford one that’s 500K or more.
people move to wear they can afford homes.
An excise tax on multiple house owners would be good in my opinion. And make the percentage go up with the number houses an individual or entity owns.
Are you including landlords? Most people with multiple houses have them to rent out: they’re not empty.
Some percentage of people have a second “empty” house for vacations or as snowbirds, but I imagine the number with more is vanishingly small.
I like the variation we have now, but more so. Let’s increase property taxes substantially, but also increase the residential exemption significantly.
- Low end houses become close to free of taxes
- the average house is taxed the same
- but taxes on high end houses and multiple houses are higher
- so overall property taxes go way up
I didn’t say anything about empty houses. I just said houses. Fuck landlords. And if you can afford an extra house that you don’t live in all the time, you can afford extra taxes on that house.
Oh and yeah, we should absolutely lower the taxes on single occupancy homes. EAT THE FUCKING RICH
Exactly this
except you’re wrong.
housing production has been below population growth for over two decades.
when covid happened rents in my city dropped 50% overnight. why? because nobody wanted to live there anymore.
demand is everything. prices are low where demand is low, and prices are high where demand is high.
renovation is often more expensive than new housing. what needs to happen is for all the SFH crap to be zoned to multi family and for 3-5 story condo buildings to replace them. boom housing crisis solved.
also you need a vacancy rate of 8% or greater or more to bring prices down. the vacancy rate in my city is like 1.3% only way to get a massive vacancy rate is a economic crisis or to build more housing than there is demand.
No, you’re just wrong. You can’t twist reality to fit some niche ideological fantasy that you find sexy.
The reality is that statistics show that if we took all the vacant houses including all those that are inhabitable, under renovations, all the second, third, whatever homes, and we took all the investment properties as well and made them all immediately available, there would still NOT be enough houses to meet the current demand.
The reality is that we have very nonsensical and outdated zoning as well as restrictive construction process that strangle output. We need to reform our zoning laws and expedite construction to pump the market with many new housing units as possible to not just meet, but also exceed demand. That’s the only way to bring house prices down in a genuine way while also giving people homes that they actually want to live in places that they want to live in.
Property developers well never, not in a million years, build enough new housing to make their industry significantly less profitable.
The only solution is local government building social housing and being as good landlord at low prices. Good luck with that, America!
Where did you get your information from? Please cite some reputable sources. I’m pretty sure you’re !confidently_incorrect@lemmy.world.
Where do you have those statistics from? Because all sources I’ve seen draw an image like this. where even the states with the lowest amount of empty houses per homeless person still have more than 5:
https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/images/us-homeless-crisis.jpg
LAND VALUE TAX
Legally disallow speculation on human needs.
I feel like this is already possible through homestead exemptions. You can even extend this to higher density rental complexes (more incentive for an apartment complex to be fully occupied). Unfortunately this exemption is tiny in some places.
Im not sure how it would be possible to directly outlaw speculation (pretty much anyone who buys a house would be suspect), but LVTs are a way to change the incentive structure of landowning to ensure it can’t occur at all, while also funding the government (or a UBI).
Isn’t this property tax? Which I believe every state has. There should probably be a larger homestead discount though. It’s nothing where I live.
it’s a tax on land.
not a tax on property or improvements on the land.
often the idea being you incentivize development because the developed land is taxed at the same or lower rate than undeveloped land.
a conventional property tax taxes the land and the improvements equally. this often disincentivized development because developing the land means paying more taxes.
But doesn’t development increase the land value as well? In high demand places the land value is the significant factor in the property anyways.
Development of surrounding land increases land value yes, but the idea is that since the landowner didn’t do that development themselves, they shouldn’t be able to profit from it through increased value of their own land. “Land value” is kind of an amorphous though, another way to think about it is that we want to incentivize the most economically optimal use of land in high demand areas, thus we should tax all land proportional to demand (measured via price) to encourage those landowners who have undeveloped or under-utilized land relative to demand to use it.
(note this is counter-intuitively pro-environmental because it applies most to land with high demand, e.g. cities, not forest or farmland, and if cities can be successfully densified to satisfy housing demand, pressure to sprawl can be reduced, increasing those lands left to nature)
Ok so the idea is we want high density land development to be cheaper relative to low density land development to encourage urban living?
It’s still unclear to me why land value tax vs property tax is different in this scenario.
If the land surrounding an underdeveloped parcel rises in value, so too does the property tax. Do you mean that we should decrease the tax on improvements? I think this can be done with taxation based on things like number of tenants or businesses (less tax for more density). Otherwise you just end up with lower density luxury condos everywhere.
And by economically optimal, do you mean optimal for the most people or for the most profit? These often differ.
The other people didn’t mention it, but this comes from the economic school called Georgism. If you want to know more that keyword should help you out.
Thanks, it’s good to learn. Not sure I agree completely.
Yep. The ‘housing crisis’ is a load of bullshit.
It really isn’t, the area I grew up in has a ton of empty houses because people do not want to live there due to a lack of jobs and opportunity in general. The area I live in now has tons of NIMBYs blocking new housing development despite there being tons of jobs and opportunity.
it’s it a solution or more that they’re are abandoned areas with empty houses in places with no jobs or investments which aren’t for for a community?
I run a condo building and there’s about half a dozen apartments in the building that have been sitting vacant for as long as I’ve been here for about 5 years now. The owners don’t even live in the country. Just apartments sitting there unused for years
they are an investment.
here in boston, chinese people buy up apartments for their children to go to college, years ahead of time. several vacant buildings near my own place. even if their kid doesn’t go to school here, it’s still an asset that appreciates. chinese landlord that lives half a globe away doesn’t care about renting it out either. it’s just a place to park their money.
As long as we refuse to decouple housing from a tool of speculation, we will not address affordable housing.
most people’s wealth is tied up in housing. so if you decouple that you will make most americans much poorer
I think it’s fine to use it as a speculation tool if you are living there. If not, then it should be a massive tax liability. Pressure people buying empty homes to either rent them to someone for cheap, live in them, or sell them.
this is precisely what NIMBYism is. People living in their own homes, who want to force up the value by preventing new homes from being constructed.
it’s also the reason for the crisis. without that attitude and all the zoning restrictions, our housing market would be much more cheap and flexible. but when you have towns that only permit like 50 new houses a a year, and the population is growing at 3x that, you have a serious problem
The flip side is when your state mandates allowing 4-6 homes on regular SFH plots and then your property value goes up because you can now build more housing
I think the concept of a tax penalty with some relief for having a tenant that isn’t being gouged sounds nice.
Hell, just requiring HAVING a tenant would be great for starters because of how many empty homes there are. If you’ve got the empty homes, and a tax penalty for them being empty, suddenly they’d have to compete for tenants. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
What we need is a mandated and enforced vacancy tax nationwide. Make it high enough to fix the housing crisis.
*Edited to add: according to the Wikipedia article I linked, Canada and the USA have cities that have implemented vacancy taxes. We need to do like France and Ireland and make it nationwide.
Most homeowners only own the home they live in. For what it’s worth, housing prices don’t matter if you don’t intend to buy or sell.
I think much more money is tied up in funds that indirectly own the houses. Common folk likely have some of their 401k tied up, knowingly or unknowingly.
Housing prices shouldn’t matter, except you can borrow against the valuation, making the hypothetical cost real. Also real estate taxes and insurance.
yes, they very much do. most people aren’t selling their 401K anytime soon if they aren’t in their 60s.
but the value of that asset very much impacts their sense of financially security and their spending habits. a drop in the stock market doesn’t impact people day to day, but it very much causes them to belt tighten.
i was only able to go to college because of the appreciation on my parents house. they never had the income to pay for college, but since our hose went from 200K to 400K they were able to get me into college. a lot of people have only been able to build financial security by leveraging the value of their home for loans.
So your parents borrowed against the value of their home to put you through college. They could have also taken out parent plus loans to do the same thing. Why is this an argument for letting home prices soar?
you can’t take out loans if you have no collateral to back up the loan.
the could not have taken out the loan without the housing value ti back up the loan.
do you not understand how loans work? you can’t just get 50K from the bank without collateral.
the point is most americans have banked their entire lives on the value of their home. if you sudden deprecation everyone’s home by 25% the economy will go into a depression.
it’s not an argument for or against it. it’s the reality of the situation.
I think you should be a resident with records of living in the country before being allowed to buy. Letting the Chinese wealthy buy up all our land is stupid and short sighted
Now those homes slowly rot and lose value and become dangereous to live in.
As a result, rich people can’t run airbnbs. Capitalists are losing in long term for pride/greed/incompetence.
At this rate they will require government subsidies to rebuild them later. All because those selfish low-to-upper middleclass people are refusing 50 year mortgages.
the houses don’t lose value. the land goes up faster in value than the deprecation on the physical house.
the price of the land is what matters way more than the house on it.
To an extent. But I can buy a house for like 25% of the typical cost around here for a 1986 property versus a recent build, even with comparable location and land area.
Varies by locale, in LA the value of structures are likely a rounding error, in the middle of nowhere, the structure is nearly everything.
yes, but most of the population lives in urban centers. they don’t live in the middle of no where. and it’s not viable for them to move there.
there are houses 2 hours from my city that cost like 200K. i could easily by them. but I can’t live there because it would mean spending 4-5 hours in a car every day. there are no jobs in those towns. anything that’s an hours drive or less, is closer to a million dollars. which i can’t afford.
Doesn’t cost much to keep some upkeep temp in the house, that keeps away mold at least
They should never have been allowed to become gambling chips.
Noone should be allowed to purchase a home without agreeing to live in it full time for at least a year afterwards. Split it into a duplex to become a landlord? Another year. Wanna be a landlord? You must live in that building full time along with your tenants. Outrageous? Not nearly as outrageous as homelessness because of the prices.
Easiest way is to ensure the unit isn’t vacant for more than a year, else they will get taxed extra. Also rent shouldn’t be x% higher than the mortgage.
Good idea. There are plenty more conditions that could be added on to make becoming a landlord/gambler much less attractive. Like: you can’t even begin to buy another until you’ve finished your year and sold the place.
Yes, the government can actually do something about it if they want, and imo that’s the issue, because taxes from property sales is much more attractive to them.
Don’t forget brib…sorry, I mean lobbying from rich people and corporations owning a lot of properties.
The first rule seems likely to work. The second guarantees no property will ever be renovated.
Some cities in Australia have a vacant property tax. It makes sense in some areas.
Make the tax on properties you don’t personally inhabit a percentage of unrealized capital gains of all assets. Limit untaxed property size to an area the median person reporting for jury duty can circumnavigate on foot within one minute. Is the untaxed property size too small for your preference because the people of your county are too unhealthy? Maybe improve your local healthcare system.
Basically, tie metrics coupled with the well-being of the median citizen with taxes on the wealthy. Eventually, the metrics will be framed or rigged by a corrupt charlatan or strongman (e.g. by exiling the sick and homeless), but to the extent that the laws are updated and enforced, people will be healthier.
it’s called a vacancy tax.
landlords already get tax discounts for living in properties they rent out in most communities.
You shouldn’t be allowed to own residential property you don’t live on. There needs to be a way for people to move so after 3 months of owning a property that is not your primary residence taxes go through the roof and double every year.
“What about renters?”
Basement suites / duplexes exist. An apartment building will be better taken care of when the owner has to also live in the apartment building.Another good idea would be to require every rental to include a rent-to-buy option. If the renter wishes, a substantial portion of those rental fees would count as equity, and at any time they can afford it, they can exercise that option to buy. If they decide to move out, that equity does not revert to landlord but goes into a special trust which pays for more affordable housing.
This is somewhat similar to how the right to buy initiative worked with council housing in the UK till they sold them all off and stopped building more.
To do something like that you’ll need to introduce public housing, maybe nationalise blackrock? 💀
We prefer to call them investment properties.
And if you let people live in them they might depreciate in value. So…
I’d love to ensure everyone has an acceptable home and access to clean water and food. It seems like we could do that.
Conversely, I’ve seen people’s living situations and people are fucking gross. This includes home owners and non homeowners.
People get shit on and then just repeatedly shit on. I’m not sure what I would do, had I held the power. Probably let people have smaller homes and start there. Like those little mini homes? Still homes, still have housing, but limited. Earn more?
Idk. I’m not a politician.
That’s true, but also inversely generally being gross on a property does not outweigh the value of the property over time in most cases. Even having gross tenants over time at market rent generally results in net profit after they leave and any additional cleanup costs incurred, plus you still own the property at the end of the day, and if we’re talking about houses, you probably own the land too.
I’ve seen what you’re describing and I think what you’re getting at is more of a societal systemic issue related to mental health and income. Most people I think would like to live clean and healthy lives, but they either need mental health support they aren’t getting/can’t afford, etc, and/or are spending more time working/taking care of family/battling addiction or whatever and end up not taking care of themselves or where they live
But at the end of the day this is all anecdotal and the whole thing should be addressed by a governing body made up of compassionate voted-in representatives using available resources and a scientific approach that want to fix the problem rather than arbitrary individuals chatting about it
Yeah that makes sense. I do wish the humans were more caring of each other. We’re all here together to live. Why not help each other?
Are you trying to make a case that a gross tenant who doesn’t pay rent is the same as a nice tenant who does pay?
They specifically said that a gross tenant paying market rate is better than no tenant.
or you cant rent them out in perputuity.
Thats not what depreciation means.
If youre trying to say the wear and tear decreases the property’s value, it wouldn’t decrease much more than a rented property, and the investor would have all that rent income.
Also they already get a tax break for depreciation…
In most jurisdictions you cant claim depreciation if the property is not available to rent.
We need a land value tax to stop real estate speculation.
Also we have more churches than homeless people. If churches aren’t even helping one of the most disadvantages and the individuals damn near every holy book says to help. What are they doing? They don’t even help the homeless children.
Yes, these are built for investors only.
I don’t know why homeless people don’t break into every unused house and squat in it, especially in the winter.
Eventually, that’s what’s going to happen, as our society switches from a Trickle Down Economy to a Robin Hood Economy (take from the Rich, give to the poor). If the MAGAs and Dems don’t want that, then they better get busy establishing a Trickle UP Economy.
Because a lot of the homes are uselessly far away for them. No job, no charity coverage, no panhandling opportunities. A house is of little comfort if you are hungry and can’t get food.
Valid.
Yeah they do that in my city and neighborhood, unfortunately they often set the homes or apartment buildings on fire, using coffee cans full of gasoline as heat/light, or straight up cooking meth.
I wish homelessness were a problem so simple as “give them a home” but it’s not. The original cause of their homelessness must be addressed for it to work. Strong safety nets must be in place, a strong welfare state, mental healthcare, training, substance abuse treatment.
Of course we could pay for that as a country but we’re instead focused on multiplying the unimaginable fortunes of the ultra rich instead.
Housing first is just the most effective strategy. It doesn’t solve everything, but it helps the most people fastest and is very cost effective
We have to fix a lot of things, but people focus on this because it’s low hanging fruit
Housing the homeless just gets them to stop sleeping on benches temporarily. It helps YOU from seeing the “unsightly hobos” in ur community. It does not solve the core issues that their having a hard time participating in our society, and is a band aid solution. Homeless people either have mental issues that need mended, drug issues that need mended, or have fallen on hard times but still need not only a home but a job to hold down that will pay for their housing and food. If it was as simple as putting homeless up in houses we would have eradicated this issue decades ago if nothing to keep the bourgeoisie from having to see the poors. Without the means to maintain and upkeep their homes they will just end up on the street again in no time.
It doesn’t displace them - it gives them a safe place to sleep and store their stuff. It gives them a way to stay clean and fit in with society. It gives them safety at night. It gives them a mailing address
It gives them a way back into society. It gives them basic dignity as a human.
I’m not saying homeless people have no other problems, or that we don’t desperately need better mental health services and social safely nets… But the biggest problem for them is indeed that they don’t have a home!
It’s not rocket science. Housing first is extremely effective in practice, for the recipients first and foremost
Yes your right I suppose what I’m getting at is the whole give a man a fish saying. Yes for a lot of the homeless that step may be all they need I know homeless with jobs using other people they know addresses for work and bank accts and such but if you don’t have anybody even that step can be insurmountable. Maslow’s hierarchy and what not, shelter and food are pretty much ur most basic needs and anything more is useless without that. Add access to reasonable healthcare and perhaps homelessness could be solved.
You’re confusing cause and effect. Usually people use drugs and have mental health issues because they are homeless. They’re not homeless because they have those maladies. Homeowners weather those challenges just fine. And living on the street creates drug and mental health issues. If I had to sleep on the sidewalk, I sure as hell would want to be high all day. Wouldn’t you?
A homeless drug addict is just a middle class drug addict with a smaller bank account balance.
Owning a home or otherwise having stable housing doesn’t mean you don’t have or can’t develop debilitating mental health or drug issues. I’ve worked with many currently and previously high-functioning, well paid, housed individuals who have developed severe mental health or drug problems despite their economic security. Economic security and stable housing absolutely are protective factors which reduce the risk of developing such problems, but they don’t eliminate genetic factors, trauma, unexpected economic hardships, etc.
Source: I work with people who have severe mental illness and addiction problems, most of whom are currently homeless.
Absolutely. The first step in solving the homeless problem is sorting out the people who are homeless because they are addicted or mentally ill, and those regular people who are homeless because the system failed them, and they found themselves without a roof. Many of those people were contributing members of society, with educations, even college degrees and careers, when society decided to stomp on them hard. They can easily be contributing citizens again, if someone would give them a hand until they can get their financial feet under them again.
Reminder: being mentally ill or addicted folks doesn’t preclude someone from holding down a job and/or being a “regular” person. They might just need extra supports.
Source: have mental illness. Am mostly a regular person but need extra supports. Am currently holding down a job requiring an MS.
Valid, but I’m referring to those really unfortunate people who have serious issues like out-of-control, unmedicated schizophrenia. Those people are not going to integrate back into society without a lot of help, which they should absolutely get.
I’m just suggesting that there has to be a triage system, so that people get the help that they personally need, whether it’s medical, psychiatric, or job related.
Ah, ok. It sounded like you were advocating for helping the “easy cases” and ignoring those that needed a bit more support.
Most of these houses are not in downtowns of big cities but in rural towns that are far away from everything. Not to mention, just because a unit is vacant that doesn’t mean it’s not being used.
I don’t know why homeless people don’t break into every unused house and squat in it, especially in the winter.
Because cops kill people who do. There will be no “Robin Hood economy” without extreme violence.
because that’s a crime.
Being homeless is also considered a “crime” in many places
This is MAGA America, there is no rule of law anymore, most people just haven’t figured that out yet.
I know what you’re getting at, but saying “there is no rule of law anymore” is a bit hyperbolic. The cops, at least in my city, are still arresting people. You make it seem like we can just do whatever we want now. This isn’t The Purge.
