Oftentimes folks who do this sort of thing get attached to this notion that if they can just provide enough numbers, charts, and graphs to make their point, then their point will be taken as well-made and that’s the end. Then you end up getting lost in the weeds looking at excruciatingly fine details of abstruse statistics, and the whole point of the discourse is lost.
Fortunately in this case we have two very basic and easy to understand data sets to review: the number of “homeless people” – i.e. residents without a dwelling – in the US, and the number of “peopleless homes” – i.e. dwellings without a residence.
There’s this great little tool called FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve website, and it’s chock full of all this great information about various aspects of the economy including employment, housing, economic status of individuals, and so forth. Among this information: housing inventories, that is to day how many housing units there are in this country and their status as owned, rented, occupied, unoccupied, etc.
Here’s what FRED has to say about the number of currently vacant housing units in the US:
If you want to see the whole dataset with pretty charts over time and everything, it’s at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N, but what you need to know is in that screenshot: there were, on any given day between July 1 and September 30 2021, about 15.2 million empty residential units in the US.
Coming up with homelessness data is a little more difficult, but when taking in all of the assertions put forth by reasonably trustworthy sources and trying to assemble a big picture, on the average day in the US there are about half a million people who are homeless. This number has remained remarkably steady for decades, and basically has stayed within that 500-600K range since the late 80s. I can’t find the link now because I’m an undisciplined writer and forgot to bookmark it while I was reading it, but while researching this I found some government report from 1970 saying there were then 300,000 homeless people.
…and 600,000 empty housing units.
I want you to think about that for a minute.
In this country, right this minute, there are half a million or so people who will sleep on the streets tonight…and we have enough empty housing units for every homeless person in this country to have thirty places to live.
There is absolutely no condition by which that is not an unforgivable outrage against our people. Germany recently took over something like 30K housing units from landlords who had a surplus of empty property under their eminent domain processes, and there’s exactly zero reason why we can’t do that here.
That’s where the angry attitude comes from. It’s one thing to be like “hey sorry, we’re short on housing and doing the best we can, here’s a temporary fix.” It’s something else entirely to say “hey we could give you THIRTY places to live if we really wanted you to have one or cared in the least that you’re homeless, but we just don’t want to because our money is more important to us than you having a home.”
And that’s not just how it is. That’s how it has been for my entire life. We have had at least twice as many empty housing units as homeless people for over half a century. That’s not just a bit of bad thinking, that’s a deliberately implemented system of oppression and waste for profit.
Just this matter of the outrageous oversupply of empty houses we have on one hand and the outrageous lack of housing for the poor on the other is plenty of argument supporting our core thesis and I could leave the article here, but there are some very important secondary implications that I feel are critical to understanding the entire argument I’m making, so let’s take a look at those and then wrap it up.
First of all it is not just to satisfy “fascists” to be compensated when one’s property bought with private money is confiscated by the government- it is right and fair and the very least that should be done, you know unless you are communist scum. There, we got the mutual name calling out of the way. Now 2 inconvenient truths for you – First what makes you think the government (under either/any D or R administration) will take the unused inventory from big bad corporate unused housing inventory? They will take it away from middle class landlords, for whom this is a business and livelihood. This same segment of landlords is still hurting from the Covid era that prevented them from evicting tenants who did not pay rent (and was taken advantage terribly by the way). But let the unit stay unoccupied “too long” and let the government take it, uh NO. You trust a government that taxes the hell out of the middle class but has loopholes for elites and corporations? This would be the same. The 2nd inconvenient truth is whether it be streets, tents, tiny homes, or nice enough pretty confiscated houses- it won’t solve the underlying issue of homelessness- which is not actually homelessness at all – but the underlying issues of addiction and mental illness. Put these addicts and untreated mentally ill into neighborhoods and drugs, crime, and death follow. Middle class folk don’t want that either – shocker I know, insert more name calling here I suppose. How about we get honest about that though – the WHY are people homeless—and stop the hyperbole of which type of socialist housing can solve this problem.