Do you think that building more housing will cause the percentage of non-market vacancies to increase? I expect that number is pretty inelastic wrt supply for a given area and you can consider it a measurable inefficiency of the market.
So if we assume that rate is static at roughly 3% for LA, to me it seems that getting that number down to 2% or less is the real wasted effort. There need to be more homes. Whether 97 or 99 of every 100 new units built enter the market doesn't seem like it's worth focusing on over just getting those 100 new homes built in the first place.
By all means, if vacancy taxes or more radical measures get passed to get those non-market vacancies available I'm all for it, I just feel like non-market vacancies are orders of magnitude fewer than the number of homes not built for other reasons (zoning, land speculation, etc).
My main point being that when people make the argument "there are enough homes in desirable places to house every homeless person" it's usually deployed as ammo for the further argument that new housing construction is unnecessary, or that new market-rate housing construction is unnecessary, which I disagree with.
Do you think that building more housing will cause the percentage of non-market vacancies to increase? I expect that number is pretty inelastic wrt supply for a given area and you can consider it a measurable inefficiency of the market.
So if we assume that rate is static at roughly 3% for LA, to me it seems that getting that number down to 2% or less is the real wasted effort. There need to be more homes. Whether 97 or 99 of every 100 new units built enter the market doesn't seem like it's worth focusing on over just getting those 100 new homes built in the first place.
By all means, if vacancy taxes or more radical measures get passed to get those non-market vacancies available I'm all for it, I just feel like non-market vacancies are orders of magnitude fewer than the number of homes not built for other reasons (zoning, land speculation, etc).
My main point being that when people make the argument "there are enough homes in desirable places to house every homeless person" it's usually deployed as ammo for the further argument that new housing construction is unnecessary, or that new market-rate housing construction is unnecessary, which I disagree with.