Homelessness persists despite vacant housing held as financial assets.

Evidence

It is enough to ride the subway in New York, especially after dinner, to be rattled by scenes of destitution and desperation. The denial of a basic human need, shelter, is a widespread phenomenon in so-called advanced societies. The other half of the paradox is that over sixty thousand apartments are vacant in New York. Super-exclusive skyscrapers, looking like self-important pencils and built on a bedrock of tax breaks, are Gotham’s new skyline. The apartments therein are bought and sold by the global elite not to live in but as financial assets. Space is available, and money as well. To solve homelessness through housing construction in California, the state with the largest unhoused population in the country, would require less than 1 percent of the annual US military budget for the next twelve years. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 55

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The vacant-apartments-as-financial-assets mechanism extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure lens and the ‘Sacrifice’ theme of value extraction — housing as pure speculative asset is the same logics-of-need-vs-profit split Mattei names.