BALTIMORE — A few weeks ago I took a trip to buy an old hi-fi receiver and a pair of speakers I found on Facebook Marketplace. When I pulled into the driveway, the seller was there in the garage fiddling with it, and when I got out to greet him, he told me the speakers didn't sound right. The low end sounded flabby and vibrating, and because he mostly wanted them out of his house and didn't feel comfortable taking my money, he let me take them for free.
When I got them home and had a look under the hood — or behind the grille in this case — the foam mounting the woofers had completely disintegrated. That was the bad news. The good news is that new foam mounting rings are easy to find and the fix is relatively routine. So with a little patience and the right tools, I'll get a stereo, he'll be rid of something cluttering his house and the local landfill will be free of one more unwanted appliance. It's a win-win-win — and, importantly, almost no money changed hands.
Another thing that happened a few weeks ago is the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, laid out a medium-bold proposal to boost the national housing supply by 3 million units, a down payment on ushering what she has dubbed "the opportunity economy" — an America in which working families can attain the comforts and privileges that come with generational wealth. Harris' vision is light on details, but as of right now her main responsibility is running a campaign, and details will have to wait. For now, it's notable enough that a major party candidate is talking about housing at all, even as it is a critical issue for voters.
Harris' proposal includes expanding existing tax credits for apartment developers, rolling out new incentives for building smaller houses and a commitment to cut regulatory red tape, all goals developed by the Biden administration. Those are all good ideas and necessary components of any robust effort to build more places for people to live. But one missing component of that vision is an articulated plan to rehabilitate vacant housing in dense urban cores, which may be the fastest and most cost-effective way to actually bring new homes into the market.
The topic of rehabilitating vacant housing is a well-known hobbyhorse of mine, so I thank you for your indulgence in advance. But the fact that so many metropolitan housing markets have both an overabundance of vacant housing and a lack of affordable housing in the same place at the same time is baffling to me, as is the reluctance of policymakers to see the opportunity that those vacant homes represent.
Concentrated vacant housing — sometimes known as housing blight — doesn't appear out of nowhere. It is the worst-case scenario of localized housing market downturns that are reinforced by mass exodus. To borrow my own aphorism, the best way to think about vacant properties isn't that nobody lives there, but rather that everybody has decided not to live there.
There is often a powerful stigma to these places that is sufficient to keep private investment out, and so reversing the cycle of investment and thus overcoming that stigma requires some careful thought. But as Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and the Bay Area can attest, those stigmas can be reversed, often ushering in an equally intractable problem of gentrification. If Harris is serious about creating more places for people to live that are priced within the means of working people, locating those new homes in places that need more people — and in proximity to the kinds of amenities that more people prefer — is a logical choice.
Nobody really knows how many vacant homes there are in the U.S. because the kinds of homes that I'm talking about are lumped in with seasonal or vacation homes, homes that are vacant because they're on the market or are isolated in healthy housing markets where they don't have the kinds of impacts that we might term as housing blight. Even so, that top-line number is something on the order of 15 million homes. Let's be extra conservative and say that only a quarter of those homes fit the kind of concentrated vacancy profile we're talking about here — that's almost 4 million homes right there, comfortably within Harris' 3 million target.
More to the point, there are significant and tangible values in fixing up a vacant home — or a broken stereo — versus starting over from scratch. One is that it turns areas that have long been a drag on a local economy back into productive use. The other is that once people have a reason to change their minds about a place, they often do — and where people lead, capital will usually follow. But for that kind of effect to take root, the catalyst for that change in people's minds has to be sufficiently bold. Concentrated vacant housing did not happen overnight, and reversing it also will not happen quickly. But the communities that experience vacancy in most cases were once vibrant places for working people to live, work and raise their families, and with the right policies they could be again. That sounds like a win-win-win for a prospective Harris administration.
