Metros with the most unoccupied homes in America

That's a sobering piece. Notably, they fall into three basic camps: places where most of the housing stock is second/vacation homes for individuals, places so poor no one even wants the housing stock, as it's in terrible shape, and places where the price of housing has been pushed up so high that even as people want to buy, the houses sit empty because the owners want more money for them than anyone local has to offer.

I'm surprised to not see Gary, IN, on the list, considering that its population has been in sharp decline for decades despite its proximity to a major economic hub, Chicago.

In housing patterns, so far I observe:

• Our economy is shifting away from labor-intensive work (manufacturing, agriculture, mining, forestry) toward services and knowledge-based work.
• Economic activity is tied to form of human settlement. Labor-intensive work tends to be low-density. Services and knowledge-based work tend to be high-density.
• These new kinds of work are largely concentrated in cities
• Since cities are where opportunities are, people are migrating away from small towns toward cities
• Prices are spiraling and homelessness is increasing due to confluence of several factors:
  • Not enough housing being built
  • The Two-Income Trap observed by Elizabeth Warren: households with two working professionals outbid other households in what's essentially a zero-sum game of real estate.
  • Very low interest rates allow buyers to take out historically disproportionately large mortgages.

I think the effect of corporate buyers and spectators may be oversized in the public imagination. San Francisco's rental vacancy rate has long been in the low-to-mid single digits.

I've been thinking about how might we solve or alleviate our housing crisis. A humble task, of course. 😉 But I think we're in it for the long haul due to the inexorable march of different economic-civilizational trends and their collision.