A weekend topic starting with the Miami Herald in Florida. "Most real estate developers will cite scarcity of land as one of the biggest hurdles to building affordable housing around Miami-Dade County. But according to a new GIS mapping tool unveiled this week by the University of Miami, there are actually 500 million square feet of vacant or underutilized land scattered across Miami-Dade County. The land is either publicly or institutionally owned."

"'With LAND, you can ask questions you couldn’t ask before,' said Jorge Damian de la Paz, the programs manager for CCE. 'Real estate developers already have this data. But now community advocates can directly ask their commissioners ‘Why is this land not being used?’"

The San Francisco Chronicle in California. "Here's a number that will make anyone trying to find a place to live in San Francisco frustrated: An estimated 100,025 households are sitting vacant. A study by LendingTree looked at the vacancy rates in the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas, revealing some interesting findings."

"In Miami alone, there are some 428,000 empty houses and the city's vacancy rate is 17 percent. It's 16 percent in Orlando and 15 percent in Tampa."

From KTNV on Nevada. "Las Vegas has the fourth highest housing vacancy rate in the United States according to LendingTree. According to the report, 15% of Las Vegas homes are vacant. That's 127,759 homes."

The Yakima Herald in Washington. "Last week, the Yakima City Council held a study session that outlined the affordable housing challenges in the city and what the city can do to tackle them. On paper, there is enough vacant land for new housing, but it doesn’t mean it’s available. The city is also at the mercy of property owners. For example, Congdon Orchards owns hundreds of acres of vacant land in West Valley."

US News and World Report on Maryland. "Crews have started demolishing a derelict block as Baltimore tries to reduce its sea of boarded-up properties. Maryland's biggest city is hardly alone in dealing with issues of urban decay. But Baltimore's many vacant lots and roughly 16,000 uninhabitable row homes with weeds growing out of boarded-up windows have proven especially intractable in poor and racially segregated areas."

"Baltimore overall has about the same population today as it did 100 years ago. Housing researchers say some 20,000 other city properties are unoccupied and pose a risk of becoming shells."

The Burlington County Times in New Jersey. "U.S. Census data shows the number of vacant and abandoned houses has grown steeply in Burlington County — and even more so in Willingboro — over the last 10 years. From 2009 to 2017, the time period for which the census data is available, Willingboro’s vacant housing units increased from 416 to 1,171. Those figures include all vacant units, including units for rent and sale and vacation houses."

"Willingboro’s 'other vacant' properties, the census category some experts use as a metric to measure abandoned houses, increased even more sharply. In 2009, there were 150; in 2017 there were 788, census data shows. Willingboro also has seen a decrease in total housing units, the data shows."

"Willingboro real estate agent Harry Walker, however, said he believes education might be the most effective tool in preventing houses from being abandoned in the first place. 'A lot of people just leave because they don’t know they have options,' Walker said. 'Most people think there’s nothing they can do if they are underwater. The bank harasses them, and they just leave the property vacant.'"

From City Metric on the UK. "Figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government released on Monday poured cold water on the widespread misconception that Britain’s housing crisis results from a lack of houses. Official stats revealed that the number of long-term vacant properties in England rose by 5.3 per cent in the 12 months to October, to a total of 216,186."

"In London, where housing supply is scarce, the growth of empty homes was double the national rate, increasing 11 per cent to 22,481. This complements other evidence showing that housing stock levels have consistently risen at a higher rate than population growth, even in the past couple of decades – even in London."

"In Britain’s financialised economy, homes are treated as a speculative asset, rather than simply as places to live. In an era of low business profitability for advanced economies like the UK, housing is often the easiest and safest bet for those looking to expand their wealth, as property prices seem almost guaranteed to rise at a higher pace than interest rates, which have remained historically low throughout the past decade."

"Correspondingly, banks love lending money against houses. Both in the decades leading up to and following the crash, around half of bank lending flowed into property. Ultimately, houses are worth however much banks are willing to lend. Banks, which create new money simply by lending, are essentially unconstrained in the amount of money they can conjure to bid up property prices."

"Both banks and homeowners are reliant on ever-rising house prices, otherwise they risk going into negative equity and becoming insolvent, with devastating consequences for the economy."

"In the absence of productive investment, this housing bubble is driving the UK economy. To prevent it bursting, politicians create artificial scarcity. This means the state protecting the rights of existing property owners and speculators hoarding housing stock."

"Property developers love the dominant housing shortage story as it means councils will often let them build luxury developments, in the misguided hope that simply building more homes – any homes – will ease the crisis."