Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.
The real effect of this type of ownership is that it distorts the high end of the market and the effects ripple downstream. They force cash to move elsewhere in search of housing, which inflates those markets, so then those who could afford those markets move elsewhere, etc.
Despite all of the data that gets lobbed around on this topic, we don’t seem to have a very good mental model for how small changes in one segment of the market explode into the others and cascade dramatically.
It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.
> Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.
That’s why I specified NYC. There’s actually very good economic work on how the housing market is segmented and how demand and supply spill over. There’s some good studies from the NYU’s Furman Center on the topic.
> It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.
Warehoused condos make up a small fraction of high cost housing in NYC and exist almost solely in a handful of blocks in Manhattan. They have virtually no effect on the broader luxury market, and take up very little land as they are mostly crammed into a small number of buildings.