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Comment by 50656E6973 | Hacker News Reader

For context, it's been estimated that there are around 18M vacant homes in the US, though it's difficult to find a reliable source for this information.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+vacant+homes+are+th...

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I think a crucial piece of information missing (maybe you have it) is the age/condition of those homes. The US has a lot of vacant homes in low-opportunity areas that are reaching the end of their first usable life and need a lot of money out into them to bring them up to standards. I’ve heard that China has been building a lot of new property that isn’t being inhabited. Those two cases are a bit different.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/what-it-actuall...

As that notes, there are significant deficiencies in a lot of the cheap housing stock in lower-opportunity areas that need money to fix. Those properties going unoccupied can still be an issue, but it’s different from speculation on new property. Vacancy rates in high-opportunity US cities are very low.

From what I’ve heard, the situation in China sounds like speculation on new properties, rather than aging housing stock that requires significant reinvestment.

It's not even speculation. Urbanization is an ongoing process. Those properties will be filled. Whether or not the developer is liquid enough to hang in there until they do is irrelevant from a societal point of view. That's all numbers and loans. People will inhabit those homes in a few years and the local communities will thrive and generate economic growth

That is naive. Many of those properties are built in places where they won’t fill up: coal mining towns that are on the decline, 3rd and 4th tier cities that barely qualify as urban, 40 miles away from the nearest job in a second tier city.

Yes, you can buy way outside the sixth ring road, but they have no buses or subway, what will you do, drive?

Sure, not every single project is going to succeed. But the government is executing a long term strategy. Rather than a few extremely large megacities, the plan is to boost mid-tier cities and the small towns that connect them. So a lot of these small towns that don't have anything going for them right now will be connected in time. Spending on building out infrastructure continues. Remember the photos from a few years ago of subway entrances in the middle of a field? Now they're in the middle of dense neighborhoods.

When did that change? They were incredibly trying to cultivate and outright force mega cities.

Leaving behind mega cities that are empty. Hell if you want to play out a pretend version of "I am legend" you could get pretty close. (Minus the zombies)

This animation by McKinsey shows a number of different paths for urbanization. There are many neuanced models, but they commonly divide into "supercities", "hub and spoke" and "distributed growth". https://www.mckinsey.com/tools/Wrappers/Redesign/Interactive... Quote from a related 2009 report called "Preparing for China's Urban Billion": "China's current urbanization path will show a pronounced expansion in the number of midsized cities across the country. Although China today has two megacities [Shanghai and Beijing] and a number of prominent hub-and-spoke systems [...] many midsized cities are growing in parallel and will become more and more relevant in the national landscape."

Now, I haven't done any close reading on this for the past few years, but back in 2014 or so the consensus among China-watchers was that the government both in policy and in action had clearly staked a path somewhere between the "hub and spoke" and "distributed growth" models. The high speed rail network is an important part of this, creating economic hot spots along the path between existing supercities. In fact, in the intervening time they have disincentivized further growth of Shanghai and Beijing, and is creating a new administrative city south of Beijing and west of Tianjin rather than expanding each of those two supercities.

I have no idea what empty megacities you're referring to...

No one significant has ever said China has empty mega cities, or even empty cities, they are more like empty districts of existing cities (eg Kangbashi of Ordos, Tianjin Financial district, etc...). The western press latches onto “ghost cities” because Chinese city/town administration units are weird to westerners.

This is the comment I replied to: "When did that change? They were incredibly trying to cultivate and outright force mega cities.

Leaving behind mega cities that are empty. Hell if you want to play out a pretend version of "I am legend" you could get pretty close. (Minus the zombies) "

I am I having a stroke, or did that comment refer to "mega cities that are empty"?

What, within context of what we are talking about, defines "vacant"

I grew up in Lake Tahoe , and having gone up recently for my Dad's memorial - and talking to some of the wealthiest realtors in the region - coupled with how areas of tahoe are literally banning AirBnB - they have a crap ton of "vacancies"

But its not like these are not owned-homes - they are just not lived in/abandoned.

Basically, the homes were bought in the past decades for fractions and either rebuilt/remodeled such that now there are +++% of the homes which are +Million$ vacation homes.

The problem with this is that it happened so densely so quickly, that the idea of running a small business in Tahoe City is tough due to lack of traffic as well as lack of workers - as you cant have workers who have no place to live...

Is there a global institute for urban planning who is attempting to address some of these issues.

In dealing with the local cannabis regulations across every county in California, and the local city planning department jurisdictions within these... my take-away is that its a ridiculously fragmented understanding of both problems and the solutions.

Seems high in the context of a total of ~112M homes. That would be more than 1 in 10 homes which I find hard to believe.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-househo...

Maybe together with houses that are not in living conditions, those numbers would be, right? How many abandoned farmhouses are there in the US?

I think it should be 17M (12%), I tried plotting it in FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mGVF (the numbers themselves from the US Bureau of Census) The highest the US has gone recently is 15% vacant housing units, and it's been going down since the Great Recession. I think one reason why 12% is not so unbelievable is that if people move reasonably often, and it takes a certain amount of time to find a new tenant, then part of the vacancy rate will be proportional to the rate of churn of people moving in/out. For a single landlord, a 12% vacancy rate is about 1.5 months of rent missing per year, which is high but not hard to imagine.

Looking at that plot, it does seem like the vacancy rate correlates with housing bubbles quite well.

> That would be more than 1 in 10 homes

I know this stuff can be highly market dependent, but that roughly matches on-the-ground observation in Midwest. (11% of homes are vacant, rental units have a ~9% vacancy rate).

Some of those houses are in disrepair (unlivable). Some of the units are brand new (not yet occupied). Some are bank owned investment properties (intentionally empty). Some are between occupants. Etc.

Like a lot of stats, one has to sit back and think of the definition and not let intuition or feelings get in the way. I can't comment on whether that is or isn't high, but I've got some experience trying to calculate such in Australia. You've got to take into account:

- abandoned yet still livable homes

- new construction not yet moved into

- houses currently in the state of being sold

- old buildings not yet demolished

- airbnb and short term rentals currently sitting empty: seasonal housing usually makes up a large extent of vacant housing in a country

- accomodation for workers/fly-in-fly-out workforce

- rentals currently vacated because they can't find a tenant

- rentals currently tenanted but not being occupied (because of moving in/out consecutively with other properties)

- holiday homes not being used

The Aussie census also calculates about 11% of homes being vacant on census night.

Like with employment markets, most people seriously underestimate the true 'state of natural churn' in these stats that can be found in a modern day country/economy, and just form a picture in their head of an apartment block just sitting there doing nothing all the time or wonder why people aren't being housed in them.

Try driving around resort towns in the offseason or even midweek. Nearly all empty. ITs really noticeable compared to other countries.

And how many are homeless and living in bad condition?

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