but the issue is not that there are not enough homes, the issue is that all the homes get bought up by the rich as investments to store their wealth.
This is only half-true. Official vacancy rates can don’t necessarily indicate that all those homes are being deliberately kept empty as investments- it’s also normal for homes to lie vacant for a while when people move out. It’s true that the root cause of the housing crisis is the commodification of housing into an investment vehicle, but that doesn’t mean that there are currently millions of empty homes lying around for everyone who wants one. We should absolutely decommodify housing and guarantee universal public housing, but making that a practical reality would still require building millions, if not tens of millions, of new homes, preferably through upzoning and infill development to reduce suburban sprawl.
I don’t agree with everything they say, but this video goes into why official vacancy rates are misleading, and why we still need to build lots of new homes to solve the housing crisis.
What’s an acceptable vacancy rate for you, considering people need to move occasionally? Anything under 5% is generally considered a “very hot” rental market and will likely see price increases.
No, but people move from out of town, and even for people moving within a city, they don’t move into currently-occupied apartments.
There need to be some number of apartments open at any given time so that people who need to move can do so. 100% occupancy would mean that every move would have to be a swap, or that no one new could move to town.
