You and I basically agree on the point that we need to stop treating housing as a commodity. But it’s kind of frustrating that you’re not really understanding or engaging with the arguments here.

Their claim is that 4.5 million of those 15 million vacancies aren’t really vacant because they are rented or sold and not moved in yet. Then where are people staying in the meantime? There are not 4.5 million people living on the street waiting to move in to a rented house or apartment.

People living on the street aren’t the full extent of the housing crisis or homeless people, as the video told you.

Their next claim is that 4.8 million are seasonal or only used occasionally. Well, that is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that available housing has been bought up and is being hoarded by rich people.

But people don’t live or work in those places. If you’re rent burdened in San Francisco or New York or Boston, redistributing a time share in a Colorado ski resort or a rich guy’s fishing cabin in Michigan doesn’t solve your problem.

And lastly, “other” vacancies might include houses that need repairs. Ok, sure, but wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to fix up those units instead of building entirely new housing from scratch?

In the case of places that have been condemned, no, it’s actually cheaper to tear them down and build something new.

Anyway, I’m not saying we don’t need to build more housing, I’m saying if we build more housing without addressing that the rich will just buy all of them up as investments, then building all that new housing won’t solve jack shit.

Yes, I agree completely. But Marxists have to ruthlessly study the policies that actually work at solving these problems and apply them, and it’s been that way since Lenin. Every single country that has had a housing crisis has gotten through it by building shitload of new housing, from Singapore to the Soviet Union. It’s a hell of a lot easier to brute force a solution by just building everyone an apartment, then it is to dance around with fake ticky-tacky solutions that really just give in to the bullshit arguments of suburbanites who just want to preserve their home values.