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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Empty properties barely exist as a percentage of total housing supply in high cost of living areas in the US. You’re looking at no more than a few tenths of of a percentage point of NYC’s more than 4 million units.

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Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.

The real effect of this type of ownership is that it distorts the high end of the market and the effects ripple downstream. They force cash to move elsewhere in search of housing, which inflates those markets, so then those who could afford those markets move elsewhere, etc.

Despite all of the data that gets lobbed around on this topic, we don’t seem to have a very good mental model for how small changes in one segment of the market explode into the others and cascade dramatically.

It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.

> Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.

That’s why I specified NYC. There’s actually very good economic work on how the housing market is segmented and how demand and supply spill over. There’s some good studies from the NYU’s Furman Center on the topic.

> It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.

Warehoused condos make up a small fraction of high cost housing in NYC and exist almost solely in a handful of blocks in Manhattan. They have virtually no effect on the broader luxury market, and take up very little land as they are mostly crammed into a small number of buildings.

> a few tenths of a percentage point of NYC

Feb 2024 (last year there's data, I think) was a record low and it was 1.4% empty, according to NYC[1].

But I don't really know the methodology, and according to other nyc gov data it's surprising, since we still haven't recovered our population from COVID[2].

The first statistic (housing pressure) is based on population growth, but the NYC population statistics suggest still meaningful population loss since 2020.

I have seen articles in the past that suggest that apartment vacancy rates in NYC are self-reported and misleading at best, but I don't really understand how that would work and I can't find any sources on that now.

It's also my understanding that some classes of landlords can mark empty apartments as income losses, basically or partially making up for the loss of revenue in tax rebates. But that's also not something I understand well, just something I have seen asserted.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac... [2]: https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/dcp/assets/files/pdf/data-t...

1.4% vacancy in a housing market is extraordinarily low. Remember: there is structurally always some material amount of vacancy, because people vacate housing units well before new people move into them. This, by the way, is a stat whose interpretation you can just look up. Real estate people use it as a benchmark.

Yeah I know it's among the lowest in the world, it's still an ~order of magnitude higher than a few tenths of a percent, which would be shocking for the reasons you mention.

My point though was just that I've seen arguments that these numbers can be manipulated, and the city's own data doesn't make sense by itself: either the 1.4% number is wrong or the slowly recovering population estimate is wrong. Especially considering the 60,000 housing units (representing 2% growth) created.

I was replying to this claim

> They leave it empty (that actually happens a lot, especially with foreign investors

Not talking about rental vacancy.

Vacancy doesn’t mean units held empty as either a parking place for cash or held off the market. Vacancy happens when you’re painting and repairing between rentals. Vacancy happens when there’s a renovation. Things like that are normal and not nefarious. Have 1.4% vacancy rate means there is essentially no usable housing for rent.

I was talking about the myth that there are tons of apartments held by rich people who don’t use them for anything.

My understanding is that vacancy means available units for rent. So, plausibly, if you say 50 of the 100 units in your building aren't available for rent because you say they're being painted then they don't contribute to the vacancy of your building.

That's almost the exact opposite of your definition, but I agree that a 1.4% vacancy rate means there's almost nothing available for rent.

I'm having trouble finding an official definition from a source that reports them, but my definition matches things that I can find online, eg https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/vacancy-rate-what-does...

Do you have any actual data on the rate of unoccupied properties that are not recently or soon to be available to rent in any major US markets? It seems like kind of hard data to find from my brief perusing around. I'm very interested in seeing some reliable data on this.

I had thought such units would have been included in the housing vacancy statistics, but apparently they are not.

I haven’t spent much time looking at any place other than New York. But there’s census data, tax data, and a lot of public records. The number of empty units is small. The total is probably close to 40k, but that’s a fuzzy number and moving target. That includes regular vacant units.

https://gothamist.com/news/how-many-nyc-apartments-are-vacan...

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