It's technically a good thing for the following to be true:
$$homeless < vacancies$$
Why? There's a baseline level of vacancies you'd expect to see simply from the fact that people move.
Even before getting into second homes, ski lodges, dilapidated housing, yada yada.
You'd still expect vacancies to number in the millions in a healthy housing market,
a much higher number than the population of homeless in the US.
Therefore, there are two ways for $vacancies < homeless$:
Either the homeless population would have to be much much higher than it currently is. (Bad!)
Or the housing market would need to be so dysfunctional that people couldn't move. That people would be trapped in unfit housing.
Therefore, the fact that this isn't true - that the inequality points in the opposite direction - is technically a good thing.
The fact that $homeless < vacancies$ doesn't tell you much, but what it does tell you is that we're avoiding a particular flavor of disaster.
But it gets worse.
Homelessness can have many causes. But certainly one of the major causes is when people have difficulty finding housing.
And do you know what else we see in housing markets where people have difficulty finding housing? A low vacancy rate!
So if you care about the plight of the homeless, seeing that headline statistic shouldn't make you despair at the wasteful uncaring world. You shouldn't start thinking about cancelling out that discrepancy. You should think "Great! Now how can we pump that vacancy rate even higher?! Finding housing should be as easy as finding a pair of shoes! More vacant homes! Huzzah!"
(To within reason. If your housing vacancy rate is like, 90%, then at that point your city is probably collapsing and much of your housing stock is rotting. But I mean, it would be easy to find shelter, I guess.)
It's technically a good thing
It's technically a good thing for the following to be true:
$$homeless < vacancies$$
Why? There's a baseline level of vacancies you'd expect to see simply from the fact that people move. Even before getting into second homes, ski lodges, dilapidated housing, yada yada. You'd still expect vacancies to number in the millions in a healthy housing market, a much higher number than the population of homeless in the US.
Therefore, there are two ways for $vacancies < homeless$:
Therefore, the fact that this isn't true - that the inequality points in the opposite direction - is technically a good thing. The fact that $homeless < vacancies$ doesn't tell you much, but what it does tell you is that we're avoiding a particular flavor of disaster.
But it gets worse.
Homelessness can have many causes. But certainly one of the major causes is when people have difficulty finding housing. And do you know what else we see in housing markets where people have difficulty finding housing? A low vacancy rate!
So if you care about the plight of the homeless, seeing that headline statistic shouldn't make you despair at the wasteful uncaring world. You shouldn't start thinking about cancelling out that discrepancy. You should think "Great! Now how can we pump that vacancy rate even higher?! Finding housing should be as easy as finding a pair of shoes! More vacant homes! Huzzah!"
(To within reason. If your housing vacancy rate is like, 90%, then at that point your city is probably collapsing and much of your housing stock is rotting. But I mean, it would be easy to find shelter, I guess.)