Because most of them are fucked?
There’s a few around me and you’d be lucky if they’ve still got a roof. If you’ve not got a pot to piss in, £80k of repairs are not on your shopping list.
Empty residential properties should be taxed to encourage renting or selling them to someone who will actually live in them.
Jonn Elledge has written some good stuff on this question.
Short version is that, as the article tacitly acknowledges, even if you filled every empty home, you still wouldn’t house everyone on the waiting list!
we have the opposite in my country. About a third of all property is vacant. If you housed everyone (and we don’t have a big homeless population) we’d still have a lot of vacant properties. And more just keep going up. If you see a picture of Malta, keep in mind that the actual skyline is littered with construction cranes. And this is not in any way an exaggeration.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
The suggested policy is not good. Since the housing market needs some empty homes to function, it’s actively bad!
Focusing on something that won’t – indeed, can’t – work, instead of things that can work, is bad policy.
Capitalism needs empty homes. People just need homes.
Even if you abolish capitalism, putting people in empty homes still won’t solve the housing crisis.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
But the policy is not good, it’s bad, and it would be bad regardless of whether you implement it in a capitalist society or any other one you care to name. It fails to address the underlying issue, fails to solve the problem even in the short term and also makes the problem worse in the medium to long term. That is, by every definition, a bad policy.
You know what else is the enemy of the good? The bad! This is the bad.
Yes Frank, giving as many people homes as possible is a bad idea.
You know you can do two things at once… you can utilise existing homes and build new ones. It’s like magic!
