
San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident - ingve
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-area-vacant-homes-per-homeless-count
======
flaque
Many of these homes probably aren’t “empty” in the sense that someone’s just
holding on to them long term. This article is citing the vacancy rate, which
includes rentals where someone left and the landlord is trying to find a new
tenant.

Any city will have some % of empty rentals, if it didn’t, no one would ever
move around.

According to the US Census, [1] San Francisco’s vacancy rate is 5.4%, New
York’s is 4.5%, and Seattle is 4.8%. But many cities have 10%+ or higher.

It’s pretty disingenuous to say these homes are truly empty or that they’re a
sign that “we don’t have a housing crisis” as the Moms 4 Housing group
suggested in the article. It’s just a misunderstood statistic being weaponized
against building more housing.

If you want to help homeless folks, build more housing and put them in it. If
you want your rent to go down, build more housing. If you want your cost of
living to go down, build more housing.

[1]
[https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/ann18ind.html](https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/ann18ind.html)

~~~
frandroid
> Any city will have some % of empty rentals, if it didn’t, no one would ever
> move around.

You do understand that people advertise apartments available for rent before
the previous tenant has moved out...

In Québec, the majority of leases end on July 1st and you have a number of
people moving on that day which is quite greater than the vacancy rate. You
can sign a lease for a new apartment months ahead of time.

~~~
flaque
> You do understand that people advertise apartments available for rent before
> the previous tenant has moved out...

True, but sometimes people just leave without giving warning, or the next
person can't move in immediately. Sometimes, in a limited supply market, the
landlord will wait for someone willing to pay a specific price since they know
there's no other options.

In San Francisco, that's the case for roughly 5% of the units at any given
time.

~~~
hcknwscommenter
As a renter who has been casually looking for a bigger place in San Francisco
for about a year (I am really picky and have a really nice place), it is my
experience that decent units stay listed for at most 2 weeks and unoccupied
for about 1 month.

------
gradys
> The census’ annual American Communities Survey defines a home as vacant if
> there is either no occupant or a temporary occupant—temporary meaning
> “people who will be there for two months or less.”

So this is counting AirBnBs and other short-term rental spaces as vacant.

> Vacancy rates are estimated by in-person visits to properties or by
> interviews via mail, email, or phone.

I clicked through to the definition from census.gov:

> Mail and computer-assisted telephone and personal-visit interviews. All
> group quarters responses are obtained by personal visit interview. Most
> vacant units are not identified until the third month of data collection
> (the first personal visit). In that month, a 1-in-3 subsample of all
> addresses for which responses have not been obtained are visited by field
> representatives.

I'm curious how well you can distinguish permanent residents not being home
when field representatives happened to drop by from actually vacant. My house
looks like it could be vacant when nobody is home.

~~~
Psyladine
>So this is counting AirBnBs and other short-term rental spaces as vacant.

by definition tourist or transient, so correctly so. Unless you want to call
every room at the hilton an apartment...

~~~
refurb
That’s a dishonest definition of “vacant” because vacant implies the unit is
available for someone to live in.

Obviously you don’t include hotels because those were never intended as
housing in the traditional sense.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Obviously you don’t include hotels because those were never intended as
> housing in the traditional sense.

Low-end residential hotels (i.e., the ones not catering primarily to extended
white-collar business travel) are, in major function, very hard to distinguish
from traditional housing. And what stops any other hotel (particularly higher-
end residential / extended-stay hotels) from selling into that market is the
expectation that doing so (even with units that are otherwise vacant) would
sacrifice the opportunity for more rent from richer people, so it very much is
a continuous market.

------
kurthr
This is the expected result of prop-13. It's true all over california.

You can make money on capital gains without any continuing investment/income
or significant tax... why bother with tenants. Just sell out to the developer
who wants to put in another high-rise apartment complex when the price is
higher. In the mean time... screw the neighborhood.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/09/san-
fr...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/09/san-francisco-
gentrification-second-wave)

------
forwhomst
This is a bad-faith argument advanced by the opponents of construction
(landowners, essentially). The facts are that San Francisco vacancy rate is
among the lowest in the nation, stands near the all-time low for that city,
and is way below the level required for a healthy housing market. You need
liquidity for a functioning market, and liquidity means vacancy.

The NIMBY groups who advanced this exact narrative in Los Angeles had to
retract their "study" because it was BS. [https://thehill.com/changing-
america/respect/poverty/471675-...](https://thehill.com/changing-
america/respect/poverty/471675-in-los-angeles-vacant-homes-outnumber-the-
homeless)

------
lrajlich
Counter argument: SF has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country.
[https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-
jo...](https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jose-san-
francisco-lendingtree) This article is promoting a bad faith argument used by
anti development activists.

~~~
happytoexplain
I can see why somebody might view that as a counter argument intuitively, but
as somebody who cares about the problem in a real, practical sense, it's
immediately obvious to me that the point isn't to criticise the city's vacancy
rate in a void, but to compare it to the potential waste. In a city where
prices are disgustingly high and homelessness is appallingly common, the
vacancy rate becomes much more sensitive to pragmatic criticism. Simply
pointing out that other cities have a higher rate doesn't affect the
criticism. Perhaps those other cities wouldn't benefit as much from lowering
the vacancy rate. Perhaps those other cities _would_ benefit a comparable
amount, and we should hold them to the same criticism rather than declaring
the criticism invalid.

~~~
pcwalton
> Simply pointing out that other cities have a higher rate doesn't affect the
> criticism.

Sure it does. Houston has a higher vacancy rate, and _much_ more affordable
housing than San Francisco. This strongly suggests that the vacancy rate is a
red herring.

~~~
lrajlich
Yea, exactly. Housing price increases and low vacancy rates "should" be
correlated (eg, not enough supply in the market) and in fact are, which the
original article's argument completely ignores and instead implies that the
right vacancy rate is 0. If those circumstances ever happen, good luck finding
a place to live.

------
biznickman
When I lived in San Francisco, the newly built condo building across from me
was fully empty (but fully sold) for all the years I lived there. This is a
tower in SOMA. There was only one apartment which appeared to be a corporate
one that was occasionally utilized.

The rise of foreign money parking money in real estate has screwed things up
on a global level. San Francisco has felt the brunt of this due to their
insanely restrictive development laws.

Frankly, for the 7+ years I was in San Francisco I was always saying they
should pass laws to prevent foreign investment in real estate or at a minimum
require people live there for X% of the year.

~~~
macinjosh
> The rise of foreign money parking money in real estate has screwed things up
> on a global level.

If the property tax is paid and the maintenance is kept up what is the problem
created solely by the fact some homes are empty? The only reason these
properties have such high values is because there is a demand that is not
being supplied. Supplying more housing makes this a non-issue.

> San Francisco has felt the brunt of this due to their insanely restrictive
> development laws.

This is the real issue. Governments restrict housing supply for whatever
misguided reasons and prices go up, those prices make it a good place to park
cash. Government should stop picking winners and losers.

~~~
sidlls
The fact that there are so many empty homes should be a bright, shining clue
that basic supply vs. demand isn't the only factor at work.

~~~
erik_seaberg
When it's pretty much not legally possible to increase supply, runaway demand
explains the problem pretty well.

~~~
sidlls
38000 empty homes is problematic in a city the size of SF with population size
900k. This isn’t just a problem of supply shortage (regardless of the reason
for the shortage).

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
Is this comparison (homeless vs vacancy) a headline thing or is there actually
a healthy metric to compare the two? Isn't the number much higher in places
with less homeless, such as Oklahoma City?

"Healthy" vacancy rates (according to citylab) are approximately 7-8% (people
moving in, people moving out, remodeling, etc). With SF's vacancy rate at
6%[2], shouldn't the vacancy rate be _higher_?

1\. [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/07/vacancy-americas-
othe...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/07/vacancy-americas-other-
housing-crisis/565901/) 2\.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/430104/office-vacancy-
ra...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/430104/office-vacancy-rate-san-
francisco/)

------
ahelwer
You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of
distribution, not one of supply. The idea that housing should be treated as an
investment is, _itself_ , the problem. How can you want housing to be
affordable while also wanting housing to gain in value, i.e. increase in cost?
These are completely contradictory aims.

Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life
necessity (shelter) into a speculative plaything.

~~~
rayiner
The premise isn’t that housing is treated as an investment. The premise is
that housing is personal property. (Just like bread, etc., and many other
things necessary for life.)

It’s cities that are turning housing into an investment through laws turning
it into a scarce resource. (Not just laws against building, but laws against
short term rentals, boarding houses, tenements, etc.). It’s unsurprising that
homelessness is actually decreasing in the US as a whole, whole increasing in
wealthy cities: [https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2019/10/19/homelessn...](https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2019/10/19/homelessness-is-declining-in-america).

But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. In 2015, about 10,000
people in San Francisco experienced homelessness at any time in the past year.
That’s 112 per 10,000 people. (This is a different, and better, measure than
the “homeless on a given night” instantaneous measure.) That same figure in
Iowa is about 9 per 10,000. The national average is around 20-25 per 10,000.

~~~
pmoriarty
San Francisco also has survivable winter temperatures, many shelters and other
infrastructure to help the homeless, etc.

I remember being in Penn Station in NYC on many nights when homeless people
slept in the waiting rooms. Police would routinely come by and kick them out.
When this happened during the winters in sub-zero temperatures this meant a
very real risk of death for the homeless who were forced to sleep outside.

I wonder if it's the same in other parts of the nation, and if the reason
there are only 25 homeless per 10,000 nationwide is that the rest have died of
exposure during their winters (or from other types of neglect).

~~~
asdff
More homeless die of hypothermia on the streets of Los Angeles than they do in
NYC. You can die of exposure when it's 50*, especially if you are wet from
rain or sweat.

------
Tiktaalik
There's no real attempt here to explain what all the empty houses are about.
Second homes? Pied-à-terre's for the rich that live elsewhere?

In nearby British Columbia, recently as property values were spiking there was
increased scrutiny of "empty homes" amongst the fact that many new condo
developments were luxury developments being explicitly marketed in
international magazines and foreign cities.

Drilling down to the individual neighbourhood level, some places were more
than 20% 'empty'.

When the government shifted to the social democratic NDP, the new government
brought in a "Speculation Tax" which was really more of a vacancy tax. The tax
essentially makes it substantially more expensive to have a secondary, empty,
home in certain parts of the province. Places that are obvious tourism towns
like Whistler are exempt.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-s-
specul...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-s-speculation-
tax-increased-to-2-1.5391309)

> Introduced Dec. 31, 2018, the tax targets homes in the most populated areas
> of B.C. that are not declared as a primary residence or are not rented out
> for at least three months a year. More than 99 per cent of British
> Columbians are exempt.

------
martin_bech
In Denmark this would be impossible as we have “bopælspligt”. It means if you
buy a home or apartment in an area like this, you are required by law to live
in it.

~~~
ryanSrich
There are several condo buildings in Portland (OR, US) that do this as well. I
don't think it's city or government regulated, but it's required by certain
buildings. I don't know if SF has anything like this, but I imagine it's easy
to get around it.

~~~
martin_bech
In Denmark its hard to get around, as you have to register your official
postal adress for the government using your CPR nr (kinda like social security
numner).

------
wskinner
> “The census’ annual American Communities Survey defines a home as vacant if
> there is either no occupant or a temporary occupant—temporary meaning
> “people who will be there for two months or less.”

I wonder why they didn’t mention one simple explanation - many of these are
Airbnbs or other short term rentals.

------
kdamica
It's so troubling to see a statistic misused like this. The vacancy rate
includes all 'frictional' vacancies, such as the period between someone moving
out of an apartment and the owner finding a new tenant, or the period between
a new unit being built and a tenant moving in. Because of this, though the
vacancy rate can be stable, it's not the same units that are vacant from month
to month, and in fact, San Francisco's vacancy rate is extremely low compared
to less problematic housing markets.

------
lacker
How do they tell if a home is vacant?

 _Mail and computer-assisted telephone and personal-visit interviews. All
group quarters responses are obtained by personal visit interview._

Okay, so if you don't answer spam calls, or you aren't home when some random
person knocks on your door, your house might be considered to be vacant. This
data seems pretty worthless.

~~~
metalliqaz
are you sure you're interpreting that correctly? I think they don't count a
no-answer in the data. More like someone answers and then provides responses
about their own home and their neighbors. I know exactly which homes are
occupied in my neighborhood, so I could accurately answer for them if someone
asked me.

------
fuzzinator
> The ten most populous Bay Area cities listed above have a combined point-in-
> time homeless total of 63,527

If you add up all the homeless numbers listed for each city in the article
this number is actually 23,528.

What is considered a healthy occupancy rate for a city? 100% occupancy would
obviously not be ideal since there would be no places for people to move to.

Are there any direct stats on vacant home ownership as a means to hold money?

~~~
perseusmandate
As I understand it typical occupancy rate is 95%. Looks like there are ~400K
housing units in SF (not total bay area).

That would imply there are 20K vacant units just for frictional reasons. I
expect the number of these type of vacancies exceeds the number of homeless in
almost every city in the US

------
cartercole
I don't understand why this statistic matters... its private property and you
have no say how they use their homes... if you want to help people get homes
lower the regulations so the barrier to entry lower... oh ya and repeal dumb
zoning laws :)

------
sigstoat
as some of the comments on the article note, you've got natural churn in
residency, uninhabitable structures, renovations, etc.

also it's not like you can let someone live in a house for free and just call
it a wash. anyone who has ever rented a home to folks knows that tenants can
be _extremely_ hard on a rental property.

~~~
cuillevel3
also some of them might not want to be registered? having a home might not be
enough to be able to deal with bureaucracy and such

------
macinjosh
Offer property tax incentives to real estate owners who have empty homes if
they lease them to tenants that have issues with housing stability at rates
they can realistically afford.

The owner gets tax benefits. People in need get a home to live in. The city
has fewer homeless. All lease income could go towards upkeep.

~~~
Psyladine
How about punishing malingering misuse of resources rather than offering a
carrot.

Owners incentivized to utilize land, more real estate available, foreign
investment squatting suffers.

~~~
macinjosh
Who gets to decide what is or isn't a misuse of resources? People like you
would rather use force to bend others to your worldview than actually execute
on realistic solutions.

~~~
Psyladine
Vacancy taxes are hardly authoritarian. If government has any purpose it is to
address the irreconcilable conflicts of individual self-interest vs the
benefit of all.

And your 'realistic solutions' leads to exploitive loopholes for people who
already benefit enough without additional tax incentives, like communities
that go in on luxury senior developments to meet their low-income/transient
housing obligations.

------
christopherbalz
Not surprising; the Fed is intent on ever-inflating the housing asset bubble.

------
human_banana
Maybe they should build something other than luxury condos. But that would
require SF to change their insane zoning laws. And SF cares more about zoning
laws than they do about people.

~~~
earlINmeyerkeg
God forbid NIMBY has to deal with a better house than theirs a block away...

------
dmitrygr
Also, Maserati dealerships have 5 cars for every person who has no car. So?

------
boyadjian
Empty homes is not a problem.

------
Jamwinner
But lets continue taking public policy talking points from them. /s

~~~
happytoexplain
From whom? And who is doing the "taking", and how do you know where it is
"taken" from? What is the relationship between the umbrella concept of all
public policy and this specific issue?

------
newnewpdro
Tenant rights are so strong in CA that I prefer to leave my home vacant when I
travel for half the year, despite having locals asking if their friends can
rent it for that duration.

It would only take a single deadbeat choosing to not pay rent, trash the
place, and refuse to leave to make it all not worth my trouble.

In another state where tenant rights are weaker I'd collect rent and kick the
tenant out on their ass the same month they stop paying rent.

CA is a great state to be a tenant, not so great for being a landlord.

Developments like Airbnb also change the game drastically. Now you can get
rental income without even taking the risks of tenants rights by keeping the
terms short enough.

Are Airbnb rentals considered "empty" by these metrics?

