[randomdata]

The problem is those empty homes aren't located where you want to live. Among cities in the US, Flint, Michigan has the highest home vacancy rate. Coinciding with that surplus, the median rent is more than a couple of hundred dollars per month below the national median.

If someone is feeling like there is a housing crisis in some part of the country, the obvious solution is to move to Flint, or another community with a similar surplus of housing and cheap rent. However, there is probably a good reason why they haven't already done so.

They've done the math and have realized that while rent may be higher, that higher rent has much greater value (access to better jobs, lifestyle, environment, etc.) and is actually worth every penny.

[zanny]

I'm sure plenty of people would be up for living in the ghost towns around the country if it weren't for the issue of needing access to food and services (utilities, medical care, etc).

On one hand, you want to think its a great idea to take all the poor and homeless and disenfranchised and just pay to let them live in these houses otherwise decaying for nothing.

But then, at the same time, you realize the real cost isn't in the houses anyway. It makes way more financial sense to keep them where they are, ramp up the residential density, and let the abandoned houses and towns degrade. Maintaining their infrastructure and supply lines, especially across vastly low density areas, is an insane expense - on the orders of hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted expense annually - and trying to artificially maintain that circumstance to use up poorly planned real estate of yesteryear is asking for financial troubles.

The real impairment holding back American prosperity is structural, but it is more in how we don't promote sustainable and affordable living. We artificially constrain population density for NIMBYisms, build cities around cars instead of people, and run infrastructure deficits in almost every county in the US that leads to the degradation of society as the bridges between us, in all their forms (digital or physical) crumble with age and disuse.

[wu-ikkyu]

>that higher rent has much greater value (access to better jobs

Indeed, and this is getting to the point that the parent and I are making. The same system which ideologically mandates maximum employment, is the same one maintaining the artificially inflated housing prices.

[randomdata]

But the economy always seeks equilibrium eventually. Rents are rising in places like San Francisco because it is trying to reach equilibrium with Flint. While it may take time to get there, eventually we should see rents reach a point where it is a better deal, or at least no worse of a deal, to live in Flint, even if the career opportunities are not as good.

For instance, as a hypothetical, if you make $70k post-tax as a developer in SF, or $15k working part time at Mcdonalds in Flint, once your rent reaches about $5,000/month, you may actually be better off in Flint career-wise. But in fact, the median household income in SF is only $88k/year (pre-tax), which means that there are probably people already living in SF who aren't far off being better off moving to Flint for career reasons (not necessarily for the other reasons listed).

[wu-ikkyu]

How does the economy know what equilibrium is?

[ocb]

This seems like kind of an absurd oversimplification. Maybe what you're saying is true over geologic timescales but if SF suddenly had a large amount of vacant housing, rents wouldn't continue to increase regardless of what's happening economically in Flint.

[randomdata]

Why would SF suddenly have a large amount of vacant housing that isn't there now, unless people lost interest in the city? A large surplus like that suggests that things have swing too far in the other direction. At that point, rents will decline to try and bring equilibrium back the other way, exactly like you see in Flint today.

[ocb]

I don't know, overoptimistic real estate developers? My point is just that asserting that rents in SF are increasing because they are trying to reach some kind of equilibrium with Flint, MI obviously involves glossing over tons of factors that affect rents more in the short term. You might as well argue that rents in SF are rising because they are trying to reach equilibrium with the rents in rural villages in Mali

[randomdata]

> I don't know, overoptimistic real estate developers?

If developers in SF become too optimistic then those homes become a drag on the economy, and SF soon loses the career advantage it currently has, still leading to equilibrium eventually.

> tons of factors that affect rents more in the short term.

I felt I was quite explicit that finding equilibrium takes time. I am not sure why you are focusing on short term movements in price.

> You might as well argue that rents in SF are rising because they are trying to reach equilibrium with the rents in rural villages in Mali

In some ways that is true. China's rags to riches story happened in large part due to costs in the US rising to the point where it became cheaper to move (some) operations over there. Reaching equilibrium at the international scale is more difficult due to many artificial barriers found along the way, however. There is really nothing stopping an American citizen living in SF from moving to Flint.