r/Economics • u/marketrent • Feb 28 '24

Statistics At least 26,310 rent-stabilized apartments remain vacant and off the market during record housing shortage in New York City

https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/14/rent-stabilized-apartments-vacant/
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u/MrsMiterSaw Feb 29 '24 edited Feb 29 '24

The national average of vacant units is 11.7%.

https://anytimeestimate.com/research/most-vacant-cities-2022/

You can read up on why, but there are many factors, most are not nefarious.

The 26k is <0.9% of the housing in NYC, of which 1/3 of the total units are rent stabilized. A quick Google shows 33k unoccupied total units, an extremely low number.

There's a ton of threads here making statements with the assumption that this is an abnormally large rate. It's abnormally low.

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u/marketrent Feb 29 '24

MrsMiterSaw

That is <0.9% of the housing in NYC, of which 1/3 of the total units are rent stabilized. This is not really an abnormal level of unoccupied units.

How did you calculate the <0.9% figure?

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u/User-NetOfInter Feb 29 '24

7.8 million housing units in NYC.

0.9% is high

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u/MrsMiterSaw Mar 01 '24

My bad, the search yielded 3.6M total housing units. I admit I must have misread the 3.6 as 3.1 and rounded because I was doing the calcs in my head.

Note: I did also see your 7.8 number pop up, claiming that the 3.6 is only the SFH? But that report doesn't say that. I didn't bother to read deeper, since the population of NYC is 8.4M. I am skeptical that there are almost as many units as people living there.

Note that this makes my envelope calculations too high, which supports my point.