There are roughly 16 million vacant homes in the United States. There are roughly 650,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night. If you do the math, and I encourage you to do the math because the math is obscene, that is about 24 empty homes for every person sleeping outside. Twenty-four. Not a slight surplus. Not a logistical challenge. A cartoonish, indefensible abundance of shelter sitting unused while human beings freeze to death on sidewalks three blocks away. I know what some people are going to say. It is more complicated than that. The vacant homes are not in the right locations. Many are in disrepair. The economics of housing do not work that way. And all of that is true, and all of that is also a way of saying: we have chosen a system where property as investment takes priority over property as shelter, and we have gotten very good at explaining why that choice is inevitable rather than asking whether it is acceptable.

Designed Scarcity in a Land of Surplus

This is not an accident. I want to be extremely clear about that because the framing matters. When we treat homelessness as a failure of individuals, we look for individual solutions. Get a job. Go to a shelter. Make better choices. But when we treat it as a feature of a system that generates profit from housing scarcity, the conversation changes entirely. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social isolation described housing instability as both a cause and a consequence of disconnection. People who lose housing lose their social networks simultaneously. The address is not just a roof. It is a node in a web of relationships, and when it disappears, the web collapses. Holt-Lunstad's 2015 research on social connection reinforces this: stable housing is not merely a physical need but a prerequisite for every other form of human connection. You cannot maintain friendships when you do not know where you will sleep tonight. You cannot return a phone call when your phone was stolen. So we have a country with enough homes to shelter everyone several times over, and we have decided that the market should determine who gets to live indoors. The market, which has no opinion about whether children should sleep in cars. The market, which treats a vacant investment property in Miami and a family under a bridge in Portland as two unrelated data points.

The Loneliness of Knowing

There is a particular kind of isolation that comes not from personal circumstance but from structural awareness. It is the loneliness of understanding that the system producing your suffering was designed, on purpose, by people who benefit from it. Cacioppo and Hawkley's work on loneliness found that perceived helplessness amplifies the health effects of isolation. It is not just being alone that damages you. It is believing that your aloneness is a fixed condition, that the forces creating it are too large to challenge. I think about this when I read the comments under any article about homelessness. There is always someone who has a story about a homeless person who refused help, who chose the street, who had options and rejected them. And these stories may be individually true. But they are doing a very specific kind of work. They are converting a systemic failure into a personal one. They are making the 24-to-1 ratio disappear behind a narrative of individual responsibility. Sixteen million empty homes. The number sits in my chest like something I swallowed wrong. Not because I do not understand the economic arguments for why those homes are empty. I understand them fine. But because understanding why a system works the way it does is not the same as agreeing that it should. We built this. Every zoning law, every tax incentive for vacancy, every policy that treats housing as a commodity rather than a right. We built it, which means it is not an inevitability. It is a choice. And we keep making it.