Sam J Miller

Empty Buildings, Crowded Shelters, and You

Vacant properties don't just hurt the people who are forced to remain homeless while apartments languish.

For too long, New Yorkers have strolled past boarded-up buildings and vacant lots every single day. Either they're oblivious, or they buy the lie that the city's already doing something about it - or they don't think anyone can successfully challenge the power of landlords to keep buildings empty if they want to. Or they don't think it's their problem.

But now that a new report, "Homeless People Count: Vacant Properties in Manhattan," has proved the extent of the problem, and outlined the solutions, we don't have any excuses for ignorance. And we can't pretend the problem doesn't affect us.

Are you paying too much money in rent? Housing is like any other commodity: if you keep it off the market, the demand goes up, and so does the price. The fact that we live in a city where it is considered acceptable for landlords to keep property empty is a major contributing factor to the high cost of housing.

Do you own property? A 2001 study in Philadelphia found that houses within 150 feet of a vacant or abandoned property experienced a net loss of $7,627 in value.

Do you want to feel safe on the block where you live? A study in Austin, Texas found that "blocks with unsecured [vacant] buildings had 3.2 times as many drug calls to police, 1.8 times as many theft calls, and twice the number of violent calls" as blocks without vacant buildings. (the Austin and Philadelphia studies, as well as other statistics cited in this posting, are from a report by the National Vacant Properties Campaign).

Do you want more stores and restaurants and jobs in your neighborhood? Every dollar of construction activity is estimated to leverage nearly two dollars in other economic activity, so those empty properties are directly responsibility for the difficulty that neighborhoods face in creating decent jobs and improving the quality of life for residents. The list of negative consequences goes on and on. More than 12,000 fires break out in vacant structures each year in the US, resulting in $73 million in property damage annually. Most are the result of arson. In Philadelphia, the city spends $1.8 million annually on cleaning vacant lots.

And even if you live in a gilded palace far away from these economic-sinkhole properties (it can't be too far... as this map shows, they're absolutely everywhere), you're paying to keep them empty. New York City spends $700 million a year to provide shelter to homeless people - when there are enough potential apartments in empty buildings and lots to house the entire homeless population. For every dollar spent on quality, affordable housing, at least ten dollars are returned in the form of job creation, increased independence and tax contributions, new businesses, and access to higher education. If the money NYC spent on shelters went to housing for the homeless, an additional seven billion dollars would have been generated in communities throughout the city. Shelter money is money your kids' schools don't get, and money that hospitals and city government can't use to ensure that translation services are available to immigrant New Yorkers, and money that the city doesn't spend to fix every single housing code violation, and money that can't be spent on fixing the interminable subway delays...

We can all think of lots of ways the city could spend the hundreds of millions of tax dollars it uses every year to keep upwards of 38,000 people in such horrible places for an average stay of twelve months. And while it's true that most people in shelter would rather be there than on the streets, just about every person in shelter would rather be in his or her own apartment.

It's time we stopped thinking of homelessness as an issue of social services and personal problems - and start thinking about it as an issue of housing. And it's time we stopped thinking of empty properties as an inevitability of urban capitalism, and start demanding they be developed into housing.

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Posted at 7:00 AM, May 23, 2007 in Community Development | Environmental Justice | Housing
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