In 2023, 27,408 dwellings (1.5% of all homes) were left totally empty over the year, and a further 70,453 (3.7% of all homes) were barely used.
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Empty homes are widely dispersed across the city, but the fastest growth has been in the City of Melbourne, where 10,000 homes are now vacant – equivalent to half the new builds in this area over the last five years.
That many renters cannot afford to outbid the convenience value of an empty property speaks of deep inequality, the root cause of unaffordable housing.
But vacant homes also illustrate how housing supply is at the mercy of speculative incentives. Low interest rates and taxes that favour capital gains over rental income make it rational for some owners to choose the flexibility of an empty home over the cash it could yield.
Housing
In Australia, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the cost of tax breaks for the owners of multiple properties – including in particular negative gearing and capital gains tax rebates – will be more than $165 billion over the next decade. That’s almost half a million dollars for each of the 377,000 new dwellings the NSW government aims to build in the state under the National Housing Accord – deployable as a subsidy or used to build mass public housing outright with no net cost.
Ending these wealth-entrenching tax breaks would have other immense benefits as well. In particular, it would disincentivise housing-as-investment, thereby cooling the market and making purchase more possible for the young. At the same time, it would redirect massive investment funds towards industries that actually create goods.
Further, by reducing the incentive to land-bank, it would likely decrease vacancy rates. Of Australia’s roughly 10 million homes, 10 per cent were empty on the last census night. Prosper Australia estimates almost half of these vacant homes were “speculative vacancies”, deliberately kept empty or derelict.
The Special Rapporteur recommends that:
- New initiatives be developed in order to bridge the worlds of corporate and government finance, housing, planning and human rights;
- Strategies be developed to achieve target 11.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda include a full range of taxation, regulatory and planning measures;
- Trade and investment treaties recognize the paramountcy of human rights, including the right to housing;
- Business and human rights guidelines, on a priority basis, be developed specifically for financial actors operating in the housing system;
- States review all laws and policies related to foreclosure, indebtedness and housing, to ensure consistency with the right to adequate housing;
- States ensure that courts, tribunals and human rights institutions recognize and apply the paramountcy of human rights; and
- International, regional and national human rights bodies devote more attention to the issue of financialization, and clarify it for States.
Private tenants are paying up to £192 a month more in rent than they were last year, with the average rise in England equalling £103 a month, according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics data.
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A survey of 2,000 private tenants by Shelter and YouGov shows that 58 per cent of tenants have had their rent increased since March 2023, and 34 per cent are now spending at least half their monthly income on rent.
Some landlords are using Section 21 no-fault evictions to force tenants who cannot afford to keep up with rent increases to leave with two months’ notice.
Shelter estimates there were 60,000 renters forced to move because of rent hikes last year.
Counting the existing empty homes in the UK is not a simple task.
There are many reasons why a home might not have a permanent occupier: it could be a second home or it could be that the owner is carrying out renovation work on the property before moving in, for example.
Generally speaking, a home that is unoccupied for six months or more is considered long-term empty. The length of time a home is left empty is often determined by council tax records.
The most recent government statistics, released in November 2023, showed there were 261,189 long-term empty properties in England. That figure represents a rise of 12,556 homes compared to 2022, up 5% annually and 16% since before the pandemic in 2019.
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Overall, taking into account the number of short-term empty homes, second homes, empty homes paying a council tax premium and unoccupied homes that are exempt from council tax, more than one million dwellings are empty in England. That’s an increase of 60,000 since 2018.
The Local Government Association and Empty Homes Network’s (EHN) research found 4% of the country’s homes are empty.
A handsome new library branch in Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan, had its soft opening Thursday. It’s the second library in town during the past year or so to try something clever and innovative: partnering with a 100 percent affordable housing development. New subsidized apartments occupy a 12-floor tower above the library.
These days, NIMBYs are always fighting affordable housing projects. Communities are increasingly desperate for libraries. One obvious solution is the twofer — building housing and a library together — because there’s strength in numbers.
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But that’s only half the Inwood project. In addition to the library and apartment tower, which has its own entrance and name, The Eliza, the development also includes a pre-K, a STEM study center, a teaching kitchen and community spaces.
- In short: The proposal includes prescribing standards to ceiling insulation, draught proofing, hot water systems, cooling and heating.
- An academic says the rental standards would improve quality of life for renters and improve environmental sustainability.
- What's next? Victoria is consulting on the new minimum standards until July 1.
Regardless of what framework you think makes the most sense, tackling the housing shortage in America is an imperative to tame the cost of living, promote community development, reduce financial stress, and even reduce carbon emissions. The only people who have any problem with making housing more affordable, in fact, are homeowners. And that’s the whole problem.
An ingenious little study from researchers Eren Cifci of Austin Peay State University, Alan Tidwell of the University of Alabama, J. Sherwood Clements of Virginia Tech University, and Andres Jauregui of Fresno State starts from the fairly obvious premise of self-interest: Homeowners want home prices, and therefore their property values, to go up. It’s a simple case of the wealth effect, and people, unsurprisingly, like to be richer. William Fischel, a former economics professor at Dartmouth, coined the term “homevoter” to describe the link between property values and local voting trends. But this paper is the first to track it at the presidential level.
The authors look at voting patterns in 87 percent of all U.S. counties across the past six election cycles, looking for correlations between home prices and vote-switching. Homeowners in counties where home prices rose in the four years before the presidential election were more likely to switch their votes toward the party holding the presidency at that time, whether Republicans or Democrats. Conversely, when housing prices plummeted, homeowner voters switched their votes away from the incumbent party.
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This is a problem for enlightened policy on housing. It’s not about whether zoning deregulation by itself is popular, or rent control. The crux of the matter is this: The population that wants higher home prices is bigger and votes at higher rates than the population that wants lower home prices. In some ways, our dysfunctional housing policies are just that simple. The easiest way to keep prices up, after all, is to mobilize and prevent the construction of new housing nearby. Contrast Tokyo, which has historically permitted nearly twice as many housing units as the entire state of California despite having a third the population and one-two-hundredth the amount of land, so rent therefore remains cheap.
Last month, the FBI reportedly conducted an unannounced raid of Cortland Management, a major corporate landlord based in Atlanta. The surprise search appears to be part of a Department of Justice criminal investigation, first reported by Politico in March, into an alleged scheme among many corporate landlords to artificially increase rents through collusion.
The investigation centers around the use of RealPage, advanced property management software used by many corporate landlords. Following a 2022 exposé by ProPublica, RealPage and landlords that use the software have been named defendants in multiple class action lawsuits, as well as actions filed by the Attorneys General of Arizona and Washington, DC.
According to the lawsuit filed by the State of Arizona in February, landlords that are supposed to be in competition with each other "outsource daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight" to RealPage. The company allegedly facilitates and encourages landlords to work cooperatively to increase rents. An e-book produced by RealPage says that the company allows corporate landlords who are “technically competitors” to "work together . . . to make us all more successful in our pricing." RealPage bragged that landlords that use its software “continually outpace the market in good times and bad.” In other words, RealPage helps landlords charge higher rates than they would in a truly competitive market. An executive for Camden Property Trust, a corporate landlord based in Houston, said deploying RealPage's software resulted in "pushing people out" with higher rents but ultimately increased revenue by $10 million.