Which U.S. States Have the Most Vacant Houses per Homeless Person?
Posted by goudadaysir
Which U.S. States Have the Most Vacant Houses per Homeless Person?
Posted by goudadaysir
16 Comments
What an odd statistic. If you’re homeless you’re probably homeless for a reason and not in any kind of financial situation to buy a house anyways.
I’m sorry, but this metric is just dumb and trivializes the issue. Homelessness isn’t principally an issue of housing availability. It’s often not even an issue of housing affordability. The main drivers of homelessness are drug addiction and mental illness. Even if you could just give all these people a home it wouldn’t really solve the underlying issue for most. They still wouldn’t be able to to care of it or afford taxes and upkeep. Until you address the underlying issues you can’t actually fix much.
Mortgagecalculator.org? The irony.
I’m not sure this is data. It makes states with large homeless populations look like they are doing better than states with small homeless populations.
Looks like a map of states people want to live in.
Okay, I’ll say it—California has a lot more homeless people now. Also, how many of the “vacant” houses, especially in rust belt, are boarded up abandoned homes in dangerous urban areas?
Yeah, but they don’t have money. I would imagine the people with vacant property would like money in return for it.
One day I hope the good designers can team up with good statisticians because this is a beautiful useless figure. Mississippi at the top cause less than 1000 homeless people (which sounds suspicious itself). This stat implies there’s some correlation or missed opportunity that doesn’t exist, you’ve just divided two random numbers and thus ordered the states in a meaningless way.
What is this metric telling us? California and Hawaii have some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country (homeless per captia https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/) yet they have the lowest homeless per vacant house rate per this data.
Wisconsin has one of the lowest homelessness rates yet has one of the highest homelessness per vacant house rate.
I think what we can interpret from this data is that if we want to reduce homelessness, we need to build a massive amount of housing in areas that have high levels of homelessness.
How the fuck does Wyoming have like only 500 homeless people
What is the implication? Put the homeless in the houses? Or California takes care of its homeless? Seems an odd map.
The top 8 and 10 of the top 12 are all deep red states. What does that tell us?
Yes, housing can be limited and have homelessness. Like here in NY.
Amazing how the usual shot hole states have the highest homelessness and the highest available housing. What’s the common denominator? So hard to figure out.
A lot of others seem to take it to mean being #1 is bad while I assumed it was bad to be #50 because it meant you absolutely do not have enough housing.
I don’t think this is data you can just look at and make any sort of conclusions. I think it’s interesting but at the same time not useful.
This is a meaningless metric. California’s population is about 13 times larger than Mississippi’s. California has 180x more homeless people than Mississippi. The issue isn’t available housing. It’s multiple issues and it’s complicated.
I’m pleasantly surprised at the number of homeless we have in the U.S. compared to what the rhetoric you hear implies (if the numbers in the link are accurate). The homelessness rate in the U.S. is quite a bit lower than it is in Austria, Sweden, and Germany. It’s much lower than it is in Greece, Australia, France, Canada, and the U.K. according to [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population). Why all the hate for the homeless situation in the U.S.? Nobody wants to see anyone living in the street, but there’s always going to be some level of it. It seems the U.S. doesn’t have an inordinate homelessness problem.
Homelessness isn’t strictly a case of someone not having a place to live. It’s so much more complicated than that. But this data does point to an underlying problem with American capitalism: Ownership of anything is becoming increasingly difficult.