The United States is wrestling with a massive housing shortage — with more than 4 million housing units needed to meet demand. The lack of affordable housing has caused record-high rent burdens and soaring homelessness. More than 770,000 people were officially counted as homeless last year, the highest in modern history. President Donald Trump is even musing about whether to declare a national emergency to address it.
At the same time, there are nearly 15 million vacant homes across the US, according to LendingTree, a platform that connects borrowers with banks offering loans. More than a third of these — over 5 million — are concentrated in just the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. Could already existing homes be a simple solution to the housing crisis?
The idea sounds appealingly intuitive. Earlier this year, I wrote about the idea of seniors renting out their spare bedrooms. It seemed feasible that the same logic — easing pressure through using existing vacancies — could be applied to entire houses.
But a closer look at the data reveals why vacant housing isn’t such a quick fix for America’s broader affordability crisis. The Census Bureau’s housing survey definition classifies a housing unit as vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview — a category that can cover everything from move-in-ready apartments to vacation homes or units held off the market. Not all of those can easily become affordable housing. The problem isn’t just about having enough physical structures — it’s also about having the right homes, in the right places, at the right prices.
Where the push for reviving vacant housing makes sense
In places like Baltimore and Detroit, addressing abandoned homes is essential for the cities’ futures. Detroit, for example, once had nearly 100,000 vacant houses at its worst point after the Great Recession. These are often buildings that are falling apart and have been empty for years, making whole blocks unsafe and run-down.
The city’s land bank authority offers a model for how cities can tackle large-scale abandonment. Backed by a mix of federal and local funds plus property-sale revenue, the land bank resolves ownership issues, demolishes, or stabilizes unsafe buildings, and then sells properties “as is,” often requiring buyers to bring them up to code — splitting the work between public cleanup and private renovation. Since 2014, the land bank has acquired and disposed of over 115,000 properties, demolishing more than 27,000 structures and selling 20,000 properties to new owners.
These programs do more than just fix individual houses. By cleaning up clusters of abandoned buildings, they help stop other homes in the city from falling apart too. They make neighborhoods better for people who already live there and more appealing to newcomers. These cities still need to build new housing in other areas, but stopping the rot from spreading is an important first step toward turning things around.
“Our goal, our task, has been to address blight in the neighborhood,” land bank CEO Tammy Daniels, told me. Over the last decade the authority has reduced its inventory from 45,000 vacant homes to fewer than 4,500, with nearly 1,700 additional properties in the sales pipeline.
Baltimore is now attempting its own version of Detroit’s approach. With roughly 13,000 vacant homes, many occupied and attached row houses are especially at risk of damage because they share walls and roofs with vacant units; when one house starts crumbling, it damages the houses next to it.
Last fall Gov. Wes Moore pledged to eliminate 5,000 vacant properties in the state over the next five years. The initiative aims to combine state funding, city resources, and private investment, though it faces significant bureaucratic hurdles around permitting and property acquisition.
Developers like Fabio O’Donnell, who runs the Housing Revival Project, highlight the challenges of scaling up these efforts. The level of funding to really address the blight and poverty is much greater than what policymakers are putting forward, he said. O’Donnell added that dynamics for existing competitive funding generally favors established housing assistance organizations over developers like him who add to the overall housing stock.
These programs may be important for revitalizing their cities, but the limits of the approach for the affordable housing crisis more broadly become clear when you consider geography. But Ocean City’s empty vacation houses or Baltimore’s 13,000 abandoned rowhouses aren’t practically accessible to a family facing eviction in New York City. Empty houses in one place can’t easily help people who need housing somewhere else.
The challenge becomes even clearer when you dig into why those 15 million homes are sitting empty in the first place. In places like Baltimore and Detroit, the vacancies come from public disinvestment, the subprime mortgage crisis, and residents leaving the cities. But in other places, the vacancies stem from very different economic pressures.
Why are there so many vacant homes?
The 15 million number touted by sites such as LendingTree can be misleading. A big chunk of vacant homes aren’t sitting empty because of some problem or scam and therefore ready to be repurposed — they’re just part of how the rental market normally works. About one-third of empty houses are in the middle of the normal rental process — some are sitting vacant while landlords look for new tenants, while others are temporarily empty so repairs or updates can be made before the next renter moves in. A healthy rental market typically maintains vacancy rates between 3-5 percent to allow for natural churn as tenants move, landlords make repairs, and new renters are found. LendingTree’s data reinforces this: 28 percent of vacant units in the 50 largest metros are vacant specifically because they’re available for rent.
Another significant chunk — 20.7 percent — are seasonal homes, vacation properties, or occasionally used residences. These aren’t abandoned or neglected; they’re just second houses in places like beach towns or mountain villages that see heavy seasonal use but may sit empty for months at a time.
This helps explain why cities like Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC — both with vacancy rates below 5 percent — also tend to have high housing costs. Too few vacancies means renters get stuck paying high prices because they have nowhere else to go.
Lawmakers can take on speculators who buy up property and leave it empty
That said, some properties do sit empty because wealthy investors bought them primarily to make money. Addressing this speculation — and making these homes available for people to live in — is a worthwhile effort at the margins, even if it’s far from a comprehensive solution to the housing shortage.
The speculation problem is, unsurprisingly, worst at the high end of the market. “In places where they have data like New York, you’ll see that as you go up the rent ladder, there’s a higher level of vacancy in those buildings,” said George McCarthy, the president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These aren’t primarily poor neighborhoods where apartments sit empty because people can’t afford rent. Instead, it’s expensive buildings where wealthy investors are buying units to store their money, and waiting for the right moment to sell.
This phenomenon has “definitely become worse with the advent of short-term rentals,” McCarthy notes, pointing to “lots of institutional capital invading cities” and investors converting owner-occupied homes to rental properties.
Several cities and states have developed tools to tackle this speculative behavior. The vacant homes tax in Vancouver, British Columbia, pushed thousands of condos back onto the rental market by making it expensive to hold properties empty. Oakland, California, has implemented similar measures, while other jurisdictions use escalating property tax surcharges for vacant properties.
Washington, DC, illustrates how these policies can backfire without strong enforcement. The city does have laws that impose higher property taxes on vacant buildings, but a lawsuit filed in 2022 revealed that a building owner had lied about his property being occupied for over a decade. Last year the city secured a $1.8 million judgment against him.
Some of the most promising approaches to tackle speculative vacancies combine taxes with transparency. Making property owners reveal who really owns the building — including the actual people behind shell companies and LLCs — helps cities track speculation, while policies that charge increasing fees for long-term vacant properties push owners to either use their buildings or sell them.
McCarthy suggests that homestead exemptions, which reduce property taxes for owner-occupants, can also effectively raise taxes on absentee owners and speculators. “It’s one of the things that will financially stick to motivate the people who are holding” properties vacant, he said.
Turning empty office buildings into apartments offers promise
Beyond residential vacancies, the pandemic created new opportunities to turn underused office buildings into housing. With more people working from home, office space demand has plummeted — and many cities are exploring whether those empty buildings could become apartments.
But there’s a catch: Most office buildings weren’t designed to be homes, and converting them is expensive and complicated. Office buildings typically have fewer bathrooms than apartment buildings need, and much of the interior space sits far from windows — making it difficult to create livable apartments with natural light.
Last fall, I reported on research that proposed a model to make these “adaptive reuse” projects more financially viable. The opportunity certainly looks significant on paper: About 12.5 percent of office space sits vacant nationally, nearly 1 billion square feet total.
Still, even successful projects often require government subsidies to make the math work. And while these projects can be promising options for revitalizing downtown areas and providing housing near jobs, they’re not going to solve the housing crisis everywhere.
Looking at all the empty houses reminds us of a crucial lesson: There’s no silver bullet for our housing crisis. These various fixes are valuable pieces of a larger puzzle that ultimately depends on the slow, unglamorous work of actually building more homes in the places people are desperate to live.
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