this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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True as it may be that there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people in America, the expression misses the forest for the trees. In many cases, those homes are vacant for a reason -- they may be located in places like dying rural villages, or declining Rust Belt manufacturing towns where the local economy is severely depressed and there's no work to be had for residents. They may also be severely dilapidated and unsafe to live in. Solving the housing crisis isn't as simple as just assigning existing vacant homes to people who don't have them -- housing needs to be in the right place, and of decent quality, too, or else it's not doing any good.
Plus, it's just a weird argument to be making that we should be just forcefully shipping homeless people out to Bumretch, Kentucky to live in a dilapidated shed. No jobs, no opportunities.
The places where housing is needed are cities. The places with jobs and opportunities. And the cities that are most expensive are the ones with the absolute lowest vacancy rates.
Additionally, why would we actually want zero vacancies? Vacancies are good for the average person. Vacancies mean you can shop for a new home or apartment without finding someone to swap units with you. Vacancies mean your landlord has a credible threat of vacancy if they demand too much in rent. Vacancies give power to renters and buyers. Why would any left-leaning person willingly -- much less gleefully -- take bargaining power away from renters and give it to landlords on a silver platter?
At this point, I'm half-convinced this "vacancy truth" rhetoric the person you're responding to is espousing is a psyop by landlords to protect their economic interests.
I'm assuming that most of the people making these arguments (at least on Lemmy) are coming from the "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" point of view where they presuppose some sort of command economy scenario, with housing being a basic right provided by the state and work being an optional thing you can do if you want to.
Which is all well and good, but we're not in that society right now, and the suffering of the unhoused isn't something that just goes on hold while we wait for the proletariat to rise up. There are solutions that we can implement now that will make things better, which work better than, I dunno, then the government eminent-domaining every derelict property in East Waynesvilleboro, Pennsyltucky, and shipping homeless people there en masse, away from family members and support systems.