But they are in need of a place to live. One of the consequences of the current housing market in vancouver is that housing is unaffordable even as a renter. Those vacant homes, if they were available for rent would drive down rents for everyone and help house some of those unhoused people.
Sure, there will be some downward pressure on rents (not necessarily an actual decrease) but that's not an argument that empty homes are a major contributor to the high prices. It might not even be discernable above the noise. The argument of counting homeless people and empty homes is disingenuous because it seems superficially like that's the whole problem when it's surely not.
Idk, my empathy for middle income people struggling to buy a home is tiny in comparison with the empathy i feel towards people living in their cars or tents. I can’t see a way that we would get to full housing without radical changes to the way land is used and commodified, that would likely have upstream benefits that would help with home affordability