Landlords are scum...

Unused housing should be taxed mercilessly.
And single-family homes should have a 100% annual tax on them, unless they are owned by an individual human/family (none of this LLC bullshit) who own only 1 house. Make a 6-month exception for inherited houses just so they can be sold, but otherwise just tax the shit out of them.
Make hoarding housing a liability.
- Disagree, my grandfather's home has set vacant for nearly 4 years now after his passing. The estate cannot be wrapped up due to my estranged uncle not believing the property is worthless.
  The county keeps upping the tax assessment, and so he's convinced it's worth something and refuses to visit the preoperty.
  On paper this is an unused house in reality the roof finally fell in about 6 months after my grandfather died. The county refuses to condem it because they want the tax revenue and my estranged uncle has held up the estate indefinitely with unrealistic expectations.
  I wouldn't say my poor as fuck family deserve a 100% annual tax on the assessed value of a near worthless asset.
  
  I imagine the options would be to pay the tax or just, I dunno, get rid of the property? You said it's worthless.
  
  I don't know your country's laws, but where I live, if it's not inhabitable it is taxed way lower (and without a roof, it's definitely not inhabitable)
  
  On the contrary, a 100% yearly tax from the assesed value of the property, enacted after the property is vacant for 12 months straight, would be a strong motivator for your idiot uncle to actually visit the property, and/or the rest of you to just renounce or disclaim yourselves from ownership of what you described as a near worthless asset, and then let your idiot uncle eat 100% of the improperly assessed value's vacancy tax.
  Elsewhere in this thread you state the house is basically worthless, the land is worth 40k.... but idiot uncle thinks both the land and house are worth 200k together, if I read your right.
  Organize everyone other than idiot uncle into a plan to disclaim themselves from the inherited property provided the uncle ponies up 40k ( or maybe more if your idiot uncle can be duped into such ), so your parents in the trailer can just buy another plot to park their mobile home, and idiot uncle can deal with his idiocy.
  I mean, that seems to be a reasonable plan with or without the proposed vacant property tax, unless there are more complications between the ... non idiot uncle parties to the estate.
  I don't know for certain of course as I don't know your locale, but... you could probably find another plot of land for about 40k?
  Idiot uncle thinks its worth over 4x that, so... from his perspective, this would be a steal, to basically gain sole ownership? Let him deal with selling or demo/refurbing the house/land.
  ... Or have ya'll already tried something like this, and idiot uncle refused?
  
  What if it caught on fire? An insurance company won't insure a house without a roof. It has zero value as it is. The land it sits on is still worth something. You should have it appraised with the collapsed roof and see if your taxes go down.
  
  I'm not familiar with estate law, but seeing as you state your family is living on a trailer on the land, seems like either there'd be an exception (I don't see how having essentially unused rooms on a plot of land would be a problem) or there's some other stuff going on. Maybe if they're not paying into the estate to rent the land that'd be an issue, but I have no idea how that works for land held in an estate. I wonder if 100% tax would incentivize him to sell? One way or the other either he sells or the land is repossessed because presumably the estate would not be able to cover the tax.
- 6 months to offload a house is not always so easy.
  I did a search around the area I grew up that is very rural and I checked 4 properties for sale, two of them under $100k and they've been listed for over a year. In urban areas there's demand, but rural areas commonly have houses just no one wants on land that no one cares about. No distant LLCs want them so they are available, but they aren't convenient to anything so no one wants them either.
  
  That means they aren't worth 100k. Forcing people to sell them for their actual value will lower real estate prices nationwide.
- I like that this idea also punishes single family home owners for hoarding land. You could build a ton of apartments on a single American-sized sfh lot.
  
  I don't see that it does that. What do you mean?
  
  That assumes that all land is taxed at a similar value. However my property at 1/5 of an acre in town is worth more than a standard suburban acreage.
  I think this continues to discourage living in higher density downtowns where there is walkability and transit, while enocuraging sprawl because large single family suburban lots are cheaper so have lower tax

As a current landlord about to extend a lease at exactly the same terms for 3rd year in a row (and I fix everything within 24 hours) - I agree with this too.
It's ridiculous that my largest store of value is a speculation bubble and a piece of paper with my name on it
- Will be in your situation in due time.
  Inheritance will give my siblings and I property.
  My siblings and I have already talked about it. We're looking to see if we can transfer it to Community Land Trusts or sell.
  Here's a link to the Canada wide association: https://www.communityland.ca/
  Here's the one specific to Ottawa: https://www.oclt.ca/
  There are others in other cities.
  Some (like Ottawa) don't take individual units yet but we'll prob sell and then invest in them or if they choose to buy individual units, sell to them.
  If you can find one. Sell to a community land trust or housing co-op. You can get your capital back and the people living there can manage and own their own homes.
  You can then reinvest the capital into other projects: https://tapestrycapital.ca/
  Or in renewable energy: https://www.orec.ca/
  Or credit union class B shares.
  They try to aim for 4-5% ROI so above inflation. Unfortunately, most people want the ubsustainable returns in real estate.
  
  Ooo! Those are good alternatives. I'll give em a read through. It might solve something on my end.
  Say I want to move cities for a new job. There are at least two uncertainties I need to resolve -
  will this job work out for the long term?
  will I like this city at all (or know where to buy)?
  This prevents me from wanting to buy immediately.
  What prevents me from selling immediately is losing a stable footing I can plan around if the new city doesn't work out. More broadly for everyone in this situation though is the cash sits.
  I will need to buy immediately or park it in some investment that keeps pace/liquid enough to convert back to a house, which requires additional knowledge/research.
  So to be risk averse, sitting on the house is generally a safe default...
  But thank you for starting me on considering this as an options and what parameters need to be met to make sense.
- Chris? Lol
- Sell your house and stop participating if you're concerned about it
  
  This advice is indistinguishable from unsolicited mail wanting to buy houses in cash at above market rate... Presumably so Blackrock can jack it up, restrict supply, and charge way more while doing way less.
  Which is exactly what OP post is trying to fix.
  I'm not a hero, but I'm doing what's fair given the system we have. Even I'm saying this is fucked, but it's the best I can do to affect things for the better.
- I couldn't disagree more. All the hatred should be directed at individuals/companies that own a bunch of properties. They are specifically in the business of fucking people.
  
  The thing I hate most is that all of these clowns will tell you you MUST raise rent every year. They also would likely try and murder you if you even got close to forcing them to pay their employees more every year, or even just other people's employees. Keep in mind, if you own the property, you are making money with equity no matter if you have tenants or not. So all the rent is gravy but they want to squeeze people to death because they legally have to maintain their own rentals, which the cost of upkeep is REALLY far below the rent paid. Again, $0 in rent is STILL making money off the property.
  
  As opposed to the people who merely own one family of serfs?

Ban corporations from owning residential properties. Houses shouldn't be held like stocks or cryptocurrency. Only allow individuals to own a maximum of two residential properties, which must be occupied by the owner at least 5 months out of the year or be surrendered to the government, to be sold to an individual who will live in the house.
- In the Netherlands we have wooncorporatie, which are non-profit home rental companies. I think it's a reasonable model, although the center right government tried to get rid of them for years. (Now we have a coalition of far-right parties in power, and they don't even have anything like a consistent ideology much less policy so who can know what the future brings?)

And Airbnb. Fuck that company and the people that buy houses and use them for this. My parents live in the mountains in a popular spot for vacations and camping. Nowadays they are the only house on their entire street that isn't an Airbnb.

I don't like the idea of US government taking the property at below market value, since that would violate the takings clause of the Constitution.
What I would be in favor of is a real estate tax that increases if a property isn't permanently occupied. Something that would encourage people to either reduce rent or unload the property.
It should be a reasonably gradual increase so that landlords aren't penalized if they can't find a tenant in the first or second month the unit is vacant. However if it's been a year they should be approaching the point of owing more in taxes than the property is worth.
Then you can take it for back taxes.
It would also discourage air b2b type arrangements, unless you own and live in the property. No more buying a house so you can rent it out for exorbitant rates.
- Annual land tax. The more you hoard - the more you pay.
  
  There are specifically tax deductions for taxes paid on your primary residence, so theoretically there is a higher cost to owning multiple properties, however this cost is simply too low to be much of a deterrence
  
  As in acrage? So if I was an independently wealthy birdwatcher that built a privately owned wilderness preserve I'd be taxed more than the local slumlord?
- Couple the increasing property taxes on vacant homes with an agreement that there are no property taxes on properties leased for free to qualified individuals (people who would qualify for government housing anyway essentially) and the government will pay for repairs. The government gets a cheaper place to house the homeless, having only to pay for repairs, the landlord gets an appreciating asset with no repairs to worry about, and the homeless get a place to live. Seems like a win all around unless I'm missing something.
  
  The only thing I can see that you're missing is the requirement that poor people still suffer.
  It's bad enough to punish incident property hoarders for their hard work (inheriting wealth is hard work - you have to pretend to not be a piece of shit until Grandpa dies). You can't also let poor people benefit from that at the same time!
  
  I like this idea.
- Honestly I would be okay with giving them 6-12 months of leeway. There's a ton of reasons why it could take 6 months or more to be able to find a tenant, especially if the previous tenant did significant damages or if there's wider economic issues in the area.
  
  I'd be ok with them being able to appeal the increased rate, but they'd need to show that they are actively working to make it ready to rent.
- I don't like the idea of US government taking the property at below market value, since that would violate the takings clause of the Constitution.
  I don't like this phrasing because it seems like you only care that there's a rule against it, and have no opinion whether that rule is good or not.
  
  Well, yeah you have a point. However, at this point I'd rather see people just knee-jerk obey the Constitution even if they don't understand why, as opposed to the way everyone in this administration wipes their ass with it.
- Whether a property is occupied seems too easy to game.
  Currently many places already tax a “primary residence” differently. My town’s approach is all residences pay the same property tax rate but your primary residence has a significant value exemption so is effectively taxed less. This advantages people who own their own homes while giving some discouragement to people hoarding homes or having a vacation home or being a landlord. However the difference needs to be greater to have an a real effect. I’d argue the exemption for primary residence should be enough that lower income people be free of property tax on their own homes and the difference made up by higher rates on their own rest of us. It would be too expensive to hoard vacant properties, less profitable to airBnB
  And there is already process and precedent for towns repossessing for unpaid property tax.
- This idea of yours exists here in Belgium. On top of that in personal income tax we pay as much on an empty 2nd house as one with renters in it.
  There's punishment on houses that are below standard for isolation. Forced to renovate.
  Yes papa government, tax us hard.
- Eminent domain in California... You get $0.00 for your contribution.

The current federal government? This is about the United States Federal Government?
LOL, nope don't trust them.
They'll seize the houses of "smaller" landlords and give them to the 1% rich landlords, and their houses would be exempt from the regulations. Then they will raise the rent even more, and this time, they will actually have good lawyers, and the tenants will lose every time.
The government needs to be fixed before we can even attempt to fix other issues.
This government would seize housing, then deny access to people of color, LGBT people, people with disabilities (yes the ADA exist, but fascists ignore laws), probably anyone who ever voted registered as a democrat, and anyone else critical of the regime.
- This would have to be done at the state level anyway since they enforce most of the real estate laws.

I am a former landlord and I approve of this message. We are back in the house we rented out for 22 years after we moved across the country to a better job, in a place we didn't care for. We kept our house here so we could come back. We rented it out for 22 years at 30% or even less than market rate ($1600 a month in 2022 for a 3 bed two bath house near LA and a 10 m walk from the train) and we endured crooked and incompetent property managers, failed appliances and tenants who didn't pay rent. One became a bank robber after we evicted them for not paying rent. They could have started robbing banks earlier I guess so they could at least pay the rent. Anyway, it worked out very well for us. We are back in our house where we like to live. People and companies who buy a bunch of houses and don't rent them out to give people places to live shouldn't be able to profit from doing that.
- Anyway, it worked out very well for us
  This proves the point. This is the kind of story that should end "so, in the end we ended up losing money on the place". But, if an absent landlord can hire crooked and incompetent property managers, deal with deadbeat tenants, and still have it work out very well for them then it's an investment where you really can't lose.
  I'm sure you're lovely people. I don't mean to criticize you in particular, just the game.
  
  Had we sold our house when we took that job back east we would never have been able to come back here on what we could have saved from what a working person makes. So like I said, it worked out for us.
  
  I don't know why you're getting disliked, it's straight facts. And you weren't even mean!

I’m a condo super, there’s one apartment in my building that has been vacant for 5+ years and the owners i think live in Hong Kong. If someone busted in there they could squat for years
- Where I live there was a super-popular local bakery. The landlord tried to get them to pay a higher rent and then kicked them out when they refused. The building has now been empty for the last five years. I do not understand the economics of this shit.
  
  Not likely intentional, more likely a redevelopment attempt that fell through, is blocked by zoning or other red tape, or changing market conditions.
  We have a similar situation on a prime location on a very active street of shops and restaurants: there’s no reason for these building to be vacant for years. However I understand they wanted to redevelop to a much bigger building and have not been able to get it re-zoned.
  Right across the street a similar redevelopment effort has been a huge success with something liver 100 apartments over street level restaurants. That’s perfect for that location and we need more of it, but exceeded zoning limits. Ever since then, our town council has been dragging to slow redevelopment
  
  I don’t understand that either! Sometimes I think people are so numerally illiterate and emotionally butthurt that they completely disregard carrying and opportunity costs.
- That's terrible. You should post the address and unit number so everyone knows to stay away from it.
- Where I live, there's a bunch of abandoned squatter places where drug heads go to shoot up.
  There's been countless court cases of the city government trying to sue the landlords who own it. 90% of the time, the lawsuit fails because of some clause where if the landlord isn't able to show up (because they live in a different state or a foreign investor), the court hearing gets postponed.
  My city tried to pass an ordinance to remove that clause but it was shot down.
  So random crack house owned by some rich asshole in California that's next to a school doesn't get any better for years.
  
  Seems like the kinda thing that would get fixed with a Finnish cocktail party.
- We need to strengthen adverse possession laws. Adverse possession, aka squatter's rights, were intended for this exact problem. Adverse possession laws were very popular in the 19th century in the American west. In western states, there was a problem. Speculators out east would buy up undeveloped parcels and hoard them for investment purposes. They might buy up a piece of land in rural Kansas. They would wait until homesteaders moved in nearby, worked and built up their own farms. Then the speculators would sell. This was a way for lazy speculators to profit off the hard work of yeoman farmers.
  So states passed adverse possession laws. The idea was that if you cared so little for a property that you don't even notice someone openly living on it for 7 years or so, then really, you don't deserve to own that property. There is only so much land on this Earth. We need to be good stewards of our finite land; especially if we're taking that land from its natural state.
  We need to strengthen and expand these laws. I would set adverse possession for condos and houses maybe to just three years. We have a severe housing shortage, we cannot afford to let units sit completely unused and wasted. If you own so much property, and care for it so little, that someone can live there for three years without you even noticing? Sorry. Use it or lose it.
  Private property is a social contract. We agree to respect private property rights, because we have found through generations that a system based on private property produces a lot of benefits to society. But private property is not some absolute natural right. If you are going to own property to exclusion of everyone else, it is reasonable for you to be required to use that property productively. Why should we bother protecting the property rights of those who are using property in such destructive and anti-social ways like using vacant properties for speculation purposes?
  
  All that would do is increase demand for security guards and expand their services to checking on residential properties the parasite class own.
  
  I agree, but I don't know if it would work well today. In the 19th century, the only way to find that someone was living on your land was to either go there yourself, or to hire someone to look for you. That was complicated because even communicating with someone from east coast to west coast was expensive and difficult.
  These days you just need to leave a cheap security camera and check in every few months.
  I'm trying to think up a scenario where it's fair. Something so if someone genuinely cares about the place they don't get screwed, but someone who isn't local and never visits loses their rights. Also something so the place can go to someone local, and it isn't easily compromised by someone who lives far away.
  I keep thinking that getting this done requires getting rid of the anti-circumvention rules in copyright law. If it's legal to provide someone with a tool that tricks a home security system, then people can actually buy that tool, use it, and move into the place, and the absent owner won't be aware.

There are literally amendments to the Constitution preventing this from happening have you all lost your mind!
- Why do we have to pretend the constitution matters when our enemies don't?
  
  Ummm... Because our enemies don't... 🤷
- They're just kids living out a simplistic power fantasy. "If I were king of the world, I'd solve this huge, intractable problem with a simple order". Like Mao ordering all the sparrows to be killed. Hopefully, once they experience the world a little, they realize that big problems are big because they're difficult and complicated to solve.
  
  Housing is more complex and the proposed solution may not work, but there are some problems that could be solved by someone with absolute power pretty easily. For example, if we shipped health insurance CEOs off to El Salvadorian labor camps instead of innocent immigrants, people would stop having their claims denied and the concept of a deductible would go the way of the dodo.

Do you think you provide housing? Here's a list of common signs:
If someone stole all your tools, you'd kill them, and you don't think that's weird.
Unhealthy relationship with caffeine (bonus points for other substances too)
At least one fucked-up bone or joint
There's some Liquid Nails or silicone caulk stuck in your favorite work shirt
Your hearing isn't as good as it used to be
Regular porta-shitter use
If two or more of these fit your lifestyle, you may be a provider of housing.

Just apply a 300% tax on empty property. Empty houses don't contribute to the local economy by using local businesses.
- How would this help house homeless people?
  
  Prices are artificially inflated due to reduced supply. Increased supply should lower cost * making homes more affordable.
  Absent other fuckery
  
  People using homes as an asset (the same way they buy stocks/etc) would panic realizing that their golden goose is suddenly draining their bank account. They’d either offer rental prices dirt cheap, or give up and sell the property at whatever price people can afford (eg, 10% of what they currently charge).
  There are currently MANY empty properties so this could have a larger effect than we often realize. Currently some cities try this the inverse way by giving tax credit to residents.
  
  I'd hope that it would encourage renting the unit even at a discount to avoid the fine.
  Which would in turn lower rents by the surge of units on the market for rent.
  
  It's a compromise, from the before times when one could assume people elected to their public positions where attempting to do those jobs in good faith.
  The idea would be to give everyone something they want so that everyone could agree and actually get something done.
  In this case, the house hoarders don't immediately lose the resources they've hoarded, and instead get charged for the damage they're doing to the economy. Ideally that money goes towards housing the poor, but that's a side effect.
  The point would be to make house hoarding non-viable as an income source, incentivising the hoarders to un-hoard.
  Sadly, it wouldn't do either without a much higher tax, which would never get agreed to
  Nowadays it's just a pipe dream that the money'd power wants to compromise on anything.

Even if we build cheap apartments for the homeless and fully fund it with tax payer money it actually saves tax payer money and gets the homeless out of the already over stressed healthcare system.
Most homeless are in and out of the hospital for easily preventable diagnosis that is a direct result of living on the street. This would free up a bed in the ED, free up a bed in acute care if admitted, and free up urgent care and other EMT resources.
This has been studied for YEARS. We know the answer to directly solving this without even trying to fix the other systemic issues at play here.
However, having a homeless population is good for capitalism. It's an area where an employer can point to and say, "If you don't work for pennies on the dollar, you'll end up there."
- Seriously. I think the solution to the homeless crisis is to build what amounts to government-funded dorms for adults. 2-3 people to a room; literally just like a college dorm. Basic shelter for anyone who needs it, but a degree of privacy you don't get with homeless shelters. You have roommates, but only one or two, and you get a place to safely store things. And the price would be affordable enough that the state can provide this shelter for anyone who needs it.
  And a final benefit of this kind of spartan housing arrangements is that you can ensure only those who need it will take advantage of it. You don't need to go to elaborate lengths to verify eligibility. You don't need to have harsh income-based cutoffs. Most people do not want to live in a dorm room their whole life. That alone will ensure that only those who really need it will seek it out.
  
  You have roommates, but only one or two, and you get a place to safely store things.
  These clauses are mutually exclusive. Has to be accessible only by one tenant for actual privacy and security, that's one of the complaints against existing shelters. Also, "make the housing just shitty enough that it might be better than sleeping outside" as a replacement for means-testing and incentive not to rely on it is diarespectful. Just provide standard studio apartments, tiny homes, or literally whatever vacant property is available and stop trying to find the minimum acceptable dehumanizing conditions.
- One little problem you aren't accounting for.
  Give houses to newcomers for not being self sufficient, then you'll be attracting even more newcomers. The cycle continues.
  Now, with 2nd generation immigrants, this is a good investment. Especially in aging countries such as mine.
  But yeah you're not taking in future expenses into account with your idea there.
  The current amount of homeless, are there to scarecrow the potential amount of homeless away.
  It's more sane, as a society, to reduce this to refugees only.
  Giving economic immigrants a free house.. that's just insane
  
  Nobody was talking about immigrants before you did. Not sure what your point is.
  
  Is it? Immigrants get jobs and pay taxes. Economic immigration can be a great economic boon if managed properly. It might be possible to generate consistent returns on investment by providing shelter, food, education and training.
  
  I am accounting for newcomers and not being self sufficient.
  In the studies and actual use cases where places have done this the homeless person is getting a 300-500sqft apartment. It's enough to get off the street have a clean bed and running water. They can then get a job and work their way out.
  The reason this works is because once you have a decent income and want to start enjoying life you can't do that in a 300-500sqft apartment.
  This isn't just shit I'm making up, there have been cities that have done this and it fucking works.

Housing the homeless is a good idea, but doing it in a random, hap-hazard way is dangerous.
Govt takes over a block of brownstones, and throws a bunch of random people off the street with abuse/violence/psychological issues in them as fast as possible for six months, it's a recipe for disaster.
You have to be careful about housing people as a government, you become (at least partially) responsible for their actions. Somebody starts cooking meth on an end unit and all of a sudden you have a fire that kills 30 people.
When the govt plans housing they can take flammability, safety, and location into consideration. If you're just buying up slums to rehab, most of that goes out the window.
- They need to invest in group homes for the people you are describing. One well paid housekeeper oversees 5-10 mixable homeless people. By mixable I mean not mixing those with mental issues in with drug users, etc. This is now impossible to hope for in the US with the horrifically cruel "religious conservative" party in control.

Based I think the same thing should be done to retail stores. If you can't get people to rent it. Force a sale of the building
- Retail stores are dying because of cars. Every time the data shows: parking spaces decrease business, bike lanes and train stations increase it.
  Stores are failing because the land they're on isn't useful. Cars have poisoned it.
- This is something I find baffling.
  In my city, it's generally a hotspot with dramatically increasing real estate costs and high occupancy, generally.
  Except this one road, which has all sorts of vacant retail, with different owners, with thriving retail and/or residential pretty much everywhere around it. Even the gas stations are 50c a gallon cheaper there then going a mile north or south of it. I have no idea why that one road is different and looking like a dying city while being surrounded by exactly the opposite.

Why pay 40% market value?
How about this instead. If we continue to have rent and landlords, let's make a market incentive to lower prices.
Tax empty housing at a rate proportional to the advertised rental rate. Example, if a landlord has an unused unit listed for 1500 a month, they pay an empty housing penalty of, let's arbitrarily say 20%. Now they have an incentive to fill the unit at a lower price. They can no longer just price-gouge with their competitors to drive up rates. What do we do with the money we receive from those penalties? We provide housing assistance. So now the top and the bottom of the market start to balance each other out. Here's the real cool thing about this system, you can tie that penalty rate to the number of housing-insecure or unhoused people in the population. Now we can have a self-regulating system that provides an incentive to push rental rates down, but also gives low-income renters more money to rent with.

Well they could fix it in 2 years by this logic
- That's assuming that there's no such buildings already. That assumption would be extremely incorrect.
  
  Mhhh true. But is this known? At least where I live the municipalities have no real overview over this...

Hey, I just rented my property for exactly what the council rates and body corporate expenses are. A $160 pw home. Not even a mark up to cover repairs etc, because capital gain will more than cover that. I did it because I hate what is happening in housing currently, especially for young buyers. Now my new tenant wants to delay moving in for 3 weeks, and not pay any rent during that time. /sigh....what scum I am....

try 100%. housing should be covered by taxes.

Canada instantly bursting in flames
why do you hate me so?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Meh, they would redefine vacant and claim "their" property isn't affected by the law.
- Right and that is also a solvable problem.
  
  Based on what evidence do you think that laws apply to people with money. Laws were made to protect commerce, and by extension, those with the money. There will always be a loophole for them.

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state.
(...)
Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before. In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for.
(Full Text PDF)

People have vacant home??? Where?
- There are 15 million vacant in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/
  
  ...since gross vacancy rate is a measure of all vacant properties — including vacation properties — states with several popular tourist destinations, like Florida and Hawaii, will always register slightly higher rates. The Census Bureau notes that the largest category of vacant housing in the United States is classified as “seasonal, recreational, or occasional use.” In over one-fifth of US counties, these seasonal units made up at least 50% of the vacant housing stock.
  Is the movement now to ban vacation homes?
  Also note that California, with the worst housing crisis, has one of the lowest vacancy rates, while Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii have among the highest rates. There's not a housing shortage on average, there's a housing shortage in the places people want to live - which largely means the places where they can get jobs.
  
  Wtf. That is crazy. what are they waiting for?

While I'm all for making it harder to just sit on housing, the "more empty homes than homeless" this, while technically true, is very misleading, and I wouldn't want to try to force unhoused folks into the empty homes without a lot more pruning.
In-demand places don't typically have much in the way of empty homes, as it doesn't typically make financial sense not to rent them out. Empty homes in places like this are generally in between tenants or on the market to be sold. Meanwhile, there are places with huge numbers of empty homes, typically because of population drain. The homes sit empty not because someone's hoarding them, but because people don't want to move to places like Cairo, Illinois.
The statistic, whilst technically true, doesn't take into account demographic and population changes. People want to live in places with vibrant economies and lots of job opportunities, and that's not typically where the huge supply of empty homes is. So we can't just redistribute our way out of this problem. Building, and especially infill in cities, is absolutely necessary in huge quantities.
- People want to live in places with vibrant economies and lots of job opportunities
  Homelessness does not exist on this tier of Maslow's hierarchy.
  
  Having a home is not useful if living it in means you can't feed yourself. You can find owned, unoccupied housing that's been on the market over a year. The owners don't want it, but no buyers want it either. If you freely gave a homeless man one of those houses without any further aid, he'd probably abandon it because he'd have to be within reasonable distance of a city to actually be able to survive.
- Also homelessness is not simply lack of a home. It’s invariably more complex, and you won’t generally be successful with simply giving a property and washing your hands of it.
  There may be disabilities, insufficient life skills, or vices and self-destructive behaviors that will fail this approach for all too many. A secure place to live is only the starting point

I think because of ex post facto, it would take 2 years at least for the housing problem to be solved in this scenario, and I don't know if handing private assets over to any particular federal government (ahem, US government) would result in the benefit to unhoused people that this comment suggests.
- First sellers get rewarded tho. Imagine massive housing speculation tank, but if you sell quick, maybe you beat it. So it doesn't take two years.
- The federal government, as the post suggests? The federal government in the US is doing plenty of law breaking right now, but not in the interest of the unhoused. If this was in their interest though (which given the private holdings of executive, i would doubt), then yes, they could probably accomplish this in one month.

Landlords are scum, but tenants are fucking disgusting.
- You don't hear much about good tenants or landlords for two reasons.
  One is of course the simple matter that people who are content tend to be quieter. Same reason that it's easier to find complaints about most products.
  The other is reduced exposure. Good tenants will generally stay in one place longer and good landlords will retain tenants for longer periods as well. So you end up with just fewer people to even potentially say anything about them, good or ill.

Obviously the system should be fixed and charity isn't a solution, but wouldn't it be cool if a wealthy person or organization or "company" just bought all these houses to solve homelessness?

So those who want to buy a house but can't afford it are still fucked. Cool.
- When more homeless people are in public housing, there's less demand for rentals.
  When there's less demand for rentals, competition falls and rents fall too.
  When rents are low, landlording becomes less profitable.
  When landlording isn't profitable, investors move their stock to higher growth assets.
  When investors sell their houses, the price to buy a house falls.
  To put this in simple terms: a rising tide lifts all ships. Housing the homeless improves the lives of everyone except landlords and billionaires.
  
  This. Thank you.
  
  Is the government going to give them a car too? What good is a house to a person that has no transportation. How are they going to get to/from anywhere with how most neighborhoods are set up? There's nothing in walking distance for them. A better solution would be for the government to tax the shit out of residential property that the owner isn't living in so they're incentivized to sell. Then the people that are currently renting can buy, move out of their apartments in more walkable areas and free them up for whatever the government needs to do for the homeless.
  
  That's great in the short term, but now no one is ever gonna build housing again, so in a generation we're back to a housing shortage.
  If you exclusively try to bring down housing costs by attempting to limit demand, you end up making the problem worse. You need to offer more supply.
- I think it's valid to address issues with proposed solutions, especially prior to their implementation. For what it's worth, their argument is not entirely sound, since most these proposals have built in subsidies for home buyers, but it's good that they are providing their perspective.