San Francisco's solution to vacant housing

Currently, in the United States, there are over 14 million vacant houses as of 2021. At the same time, there are around 550,000 people sleeping on the streets at any given night. Surely, given the number of empty houses in America, we wouldn’t be facing this issue, right?

Unfortunately, though, that is the case.

With 66.7 percent of the homeless population being single individuals and the remaining 33.3 percent being families, the need to have some sort of housing is at its highest.

Now some would ask, “why can’t we just place these people in the empty houses?” And that is a very common and popular solution, but like all things government related, there are a lot of hoops to jump through.

The city of San Francisco, however, is in the works to make this theoretical solution become a realistic one.

An empty homes tax proposed in early February proposed that property owners who have a unit that has been vacant for at least 6 months will be taxed. The money is said to be allocated towards funding for public and affordable housing.

It is estimated that this tax would bring in around “$38 million and open up 4,500 units again.”

The disincentive to owners would be to simply stop leaving houses vacant.

But the reasoning for leaving houses vacant is not considered in this case. With over 40,000 homes being reported as vacant in San Francisco, some of those homes may very well be due to repairs, simply being on the market, or other circumstances that would leave for the occupants to return, and these instances were not considered when they should have been.

Nevertheless, there are still a significant number of vacant units that serve no purpose both in the present and future, so leaving their owners to the tax would be best for long-term housing solutions.