The Vacancy Problem
We're losing housing units every day
In cities across the United States, we bicker constantly over whether we should build new housing units. NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) groups like Livable California dispute the mere existence of a housing crisis. They’re far from the only ones, however, who believe that we simply have enough housing already and therefore shouldn’t build more.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
Or, even if they were right today (and they’re not), they’d be wrong tomorrow.
That’s because housing units are not invincible. Rather, they’re depreciating assets. It’s true that you can renovate aging housing stock to reintroduce value, but much of the value itself is tied to the land itself and the services and amenities surrounding the home.
We have a framework in the housing scholarship to explain this process called filtering. We observe that homes undergo chains of ownership over the course of their lifetimes. They will, however, often end their cycles with vacancy and/or abandonment. Some cities have yet to experience end-of-cycle housing chains. Older industrial cities, on the other hand, well they’re already painfully familiar with the tail end of this cycle.
You might also be interested to know that some filtering scholars argue that filtering is a primary source of eventual affordable housing, even if it’s through depreciation.
Regardless, the main takeaway is as follows:
We will not have the same amount of housing tomorrow that we have today.
I’ve pulled a plot of mine that is going to be in some published work later this year to demonstrate the consequences of this process (and others that have led to abandonment and eventual demolition). St. Louis City has lost almost 140,000 of its pre-1950s housing stock. The neighboring St. Louis County (yes, it’s separated from St. Louis City!) has lost over 38,000 of these older units.
This count does not include homes that are still standing and vacant. Nor does it account for housing units that are filtering downward, depreciating consistently, and yet still occupied.
In other words, we’ve already lost tons of our existing housing stock. We’re going to keep losing more too, and only some of our existing housing stock ever gets repurposed.
One might argue that this isn’t a big deal - particularly in a city like St. Louis with a declining population.
Of course, I think they’re wrong. Housing scholars typically consider housing crises to be localized to the places where people want to live (Freemark, 2024). If there is vacant housing stock hurtling toward demolition in areas where people don’t want to live, it does little to aid in affordability in the places where people wish to reside.
Okay, so are we building enough right now to negate these losses? The answer depends on where we choose to look. Usually we are not. That might be why some scholars estimate that the U.S. has a housing shortage of around 20 million housing units (Corinth & Dante, 2022).
Let’s take a look up close.
In St. Louis City, around 400 units of housing were built in 2019. That’s down from around 700 in 2017. Let’s say the city managed to build, generously, 1,000 units a year. It would still take 139 years building at that rate to replace the pre-1950s housing units that have been lost.
So what’s the takeaway?
We need to build. Not just to grow, but to maintain what we already have. Otherwise, we will continue to experience and exacerbate housing crises even in cities with high vacancies.
That means that if you like to engage in discourse with NIMBYs, you should probably let them know that even to maintain the status-quo, they’re going to need to be a little YIMBY.
NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with YIMBY/NIMBY, the acronym reads “yes/no in my backyard” referring to willingness to accept local development.