[reccanti]

I think the view that we “just need more market-rate housing” is simplistic. Blindly building lots of housing doesn’t necessarily mean that people are going to move there. In Boston, for example, many of the luxury condos that have been built are being used as investment properties:

https://ips-dc.org/report-towering-excess/

I think the 61% of people who want affordable housing and homeless housing recognize these failures, which is why they want a more direct solution.

[jhundal]

The data cited on the summary page of the study does not support the conclusion that those units are unoccupied, which I think is the key question here. It does say that 64% do not claim a residential exemption on property tax, but [1] indicates that could just mean those units are rented out since the exemption only applies to owner occupied properties.

[1]: https://www.boston.gov/departments/assessing/filing-property...

[geofft]

Isn't most of the housing stock that is used as an investment property occupied, i.e., being rented out?

Also, the flip side of the argument is that not building lots of housing doesn't necessarily mean that people aren't going to move there. If you have a bunch of housing that is "not for existing Bostonians" as the page says, and it's getting rented/sold, one common reason is that your city is an attractive employment location for high-paying jobs (for Boston I'd guess tech and biotech) and so people are moving in. Not building new housing for those people doesn't immediately make your city unattractive; it just means that this crowd of people with high-paying jobs will take over your existing housing stock because they can outbid "existing Bostonians."