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Because nothing in life is allowed to be simple, "vacant" in this context can actually mean a lot of things. Here's a break down of the 2020 figure of 34k +/- 1.6k: > - 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers. > - 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident. > - 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year. (The Mercury-News references these but classifies them separately from vacant homes, whereas the census considers these vacancies in themselves.) > - Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant.” "Other vacant." Is a hodge-podge of condemned units, units in foreclosure, units in renovation or seismic retrofitting, a plethora of other corner cases and odds and ends, and homes actually just sitting empty doing not much. (source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacan...) |