We’ve discussed the sort of socio-personal implications of this approach and the difficult and (for most folks below the top who are pushing this, I believe) unintentionally damaging messages that it carries, and the stark reality that it just isn’t necessary.
Now let’s set aside the social justice concerns and outrage and just talk plain old numbers, resources, and economics.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, you have a rather startling surplus of housing units, and that’s not a good thing. Those are completely wasted resources, doing no good for anyone outside of a small group of folks we’ll talk about in a minute.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, we darned well ought to be paying folks to take those wasted units off the hands of those who are wasting them.
As it happens, I’m privileged to include some economists – and I’m not gonna namedrop about it, but if I did you’d recognize them if you follow the field, unquestionably – in my circle of acquaintance, so I asked them. Now these are busy folks so I wasn’t expecting a dissertation, but I wanted to make sure I’d given people who know what the heck they’re talking about a chance to say hey no, JH, you’ve got it wrong. None of them did.
What we have here is economic insanity. If we gave a housing unit to every single homeless person in this country, there would still be 14.5 million empty housing units. Who’s gonna buy those when we only have half a million people un-housed? What could we have been doing with fourteen and a half million homes’ worth of building materials, infrastructure, and labor? Why are we overbuilding like this?
The truth is, the entire US housing and construction industry is a shell game played on a house of cards. Naturally there’s a small percentage of folks out there who can afford multiple homes, but they don’t cover 14.5 million.
Most of those empty units are owned by big landlords who have no intention of profiting from them or renting them out to begin with. One big property management company pays a few big construction companies to spend some millions at a few big supply houses to keep their economic ecosystem churning and generating profits. The big property management company mismanages and underutilizes the new properties at a loss for a while (nice tax break here, you can get it all the way to zero if you lose enough, or even get the government to pay YOU) until it becomes implausible to keep claiming it because why would a business keep losing money on purpose. They sell it at a loss, write the loss off their income, the next company does the same thing for a few years, later rinse repeat until the property has decayed to undesirability and then eventually it’s seized for property taxes or condemned for being in irrecoverable ill repair, it’s destroyed, and the cycle starts all over.
By and large those 14.5 million empty homes are a couple of dozen super-rich bankers, property managers, construction companies, etc. shuffling money back and forth so it looks like something’s happening.
Eventually the reality that we don’t actually need much in the way of new housing construction, haven’t in a while, and won’t for a while is going to catch up to this economic sector, and when it does things are going to be very, very chaotic and confusing across the economy for a while. Hopefully the folks who get paid to manage this stuff are working on a way to deflate this horrid balloon slowly before it explodes and takes a third of the economy with it. One good way would be to sieze several hundred thousand or even a couple of million newer, decent units under eminent domain (with reasonable and fair compensation to keep the fascists from whining too much about it) and start getting homeless people into them, but that’s getting back into the social aspects of things and I wanted to stick strictly to capitalist-economic argumentation, in this section.
In the end, the “tiny house” movement helps perpetuate this broken system by continuing to prop up the systems by which landlords justify refusing to rent their empty properties to people who need them. Don’t tell us we have to rent to those filthy poors, they’ve got tiny houses right there.
With that said, I did want to give a little positive energy to tiny houses in general, so let’s talk about that and get out of here.
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.