[jpatt]

Because nothing in life is allowed to be simple, "vacant" in this context can actually mean a lot of things. Here's a break down of the 2020 figure of 34k +/- 1.6k:

> - 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers.

> - 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident.

> - 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year. (The Mercury-News references these but classifies them separately from vacant homes, whereas the census considers these vacancies in themselves.)

> - Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant.”

"Other vacant." Is a hodge-podge of condemned units, units in foreclosure, units in renovation or seismic retrofitting, a plethora of other corner cases and odds and ends, and homes actually just sitting empty doing not much.

(source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/24/21149381/san-francisco-vacan...)

[coding123]

It just seems crazy to me that we have a home for every homeless person but because of book keeping we can't do it. We seem to have an excuse for everything.