Afternoon Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Our Vacant Homes Aren’t Where People Need Houses

Matthew Yglesias: Our Vacant Homes Aren’t Where People Need Houses: “I argued… zoning regulations are holding back a potential construction boom….

One key challenge to that view comes from… housing vacanc[ies]… which… remains stubbornly high…. Banks who’ve foreclosed on homes prefer to keep these houses vacant and preserve their paper value as assets than to sell the houses at current market rates and acknowledge the extent of their financial losses. But… if rents are rising nationwide… why aren’t these empty houses increasing in value and being brought back to the market?… Vacancies are in the wrong places. People can’t move into vacant homes in Florida, Detroit, and Las Vegas and commute to jobs in Silicon Valley, Manhattan, or Washington DC…. The markets in the San Francisco Bay… have super-low vacancy rates… so do the suburbs of the three major cities of the Northeast Corridor, and… the two highest-wage cities in the interior of the country, Denver and Minneapolis. The places where people could find the most economic opportunities, in other words, don’t have the housing supply…. Rents are rising in these areas, but they’re also the toughest markets to get permission to build. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds–high rents and empty houses…