Reconceptualising housing emptiness beyond vacancy and abandonment

Abstract

The academic reflection on different manifestations of building emptiness is broad, intersecting the last sixty years of various debates on urban issues. Despite this, the conceptualisation of building emptiness and its nuances is not yet completely satisfactory. Definitions are blurred and different phenomena are often mixed. It is against this backdrop that, after a short state-of-the-art review, this paper proposes a precise conceptualisation of the main states of emptiness of housing assets. Four critical conditions are identified: i) uncompletedness, that is the condition of a building which, during the construction phase, is left unfinished; ii) long-term vacancy, that is the state of a property which remains on the real estate market for a prolonged period of time, for any reason other than the conventional circumstances of the ordinary life of a building; iii) under- and unoccupancy, which are conditions of finished properties that are not available for sale or rent and are either used occasionally (under-occupancy) or not put to any residential use (unoccupancy); iv) abandonment, that is the state of an empty building which has not been inhabited and maintained for a long time, thus being detached from the housing market due to its physical decay. Subsequently, the implications of such conceptualisation are stressed, with reference to both descriptive and normative issues. For instance, this conceptualisation could help a finer understanding of the negative externalities of different states of housing emptiness, as well as it could favour more careful ethical judgements.

KEYWORDS  :

• Housing vacancy
• abandonment
• voids
• under-occupancy
• empty homes

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of the joint and balanced work of the two authors, who consequently must both be considered “first authors”. We are grateful to Joris Hoekstra (Delft University of Technology), Martina Gentili (Delft University of Technology) and Stefano Moroni (Politecnico di Milano) for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript-although any errors are our own and should not tarnish their reputations. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insights as well.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Signorini A. (2018, 24 October) Ultima follia grillina: l’esproprio delle case sfitte o abbandonate. Il Giornale. Retrieved from: https://www.ilgiornale.it/news/politica/ultima-follia-grillina-lesproprio-delle-case-sfitte-o-1591905.html

2 The decision of thousands of landlords to reduce spending on repair and maintenance was further dramatised by the withdrawal of investment due to redlining initiatives by banks and mortgage lenders (Boyer, 1973).

3 The reference to abandonment as a contagious disease is from the text of 94th Congress (1975-1976) “Abandonment Disaster Demonstration Relief Act”. For a historical overview, see Chappell, 2020).

4 Despite the plethora of public initiatives (Massey & Denton, 1993; Myers, 1991), the problem of housing abandonment in U.S. cities remained severe in the following decades, generating a stream of studies on modes to predict its probability (Han, 2017; Hillier et al., 2003; Mallach, 2010; Morckel, 2013).

5 The negative externalities of being a city full of empty houses called also for policy intervention at different levels. Public initiatives for stabilising and right-sizing shrinking cities, focusing on repurposing vacant land for new activities or eliminating abandoned properties, have been promoted both in the U.S. (Dewar & Manning, 2012; Hollander & Németh, 2011a; Mallach, 2012; Schilling & Logan, 2008) and in some European countries (Bernt, 2009; Glock & Haussermann, 2004; Keenan et al., 1999; Wiechmann & Pallagst, 2012).

6 Housing under- and un-occupancy have been labelled in different ways by scholars, from ghost dwellings (Wegmann, 2020) and remittance houses (Lopez, 2014) to vacant (see among many others Gentili & Hoekstra, 2019). However, in our opinion, these terms run the risk of being unclear or misleading, as they can also identify other states of housing emptiness (i.e., unfinished properties and properties available for sale or rent). Thus, under-occupancy expands the lexicon, providing an unequivocal term.

7 Abandoned properties may be available on the real estate market – for instance, with the intent to be bought and demolished, as a premise for urban redevelopment – while in other cases they are not on the market because of an absentee or unknown owner.

8 In line with this approach, the following criticism could be raised when a dilapidated building, whose legal owner is absent/uninterested but which is informally inhabited by a group of homeless people, is under consideration. If we define such a building as abandoned, we run the risk of imposing a specific dominant view on the object and its marginalized uses. This dominant viewpoint promotes the selective visibility and normative connotation of certain aspects (the physical state of decay of the building) to the detriment of other issues (use as a shelter for the homeless) and, therefore, is prodromal to its ‘normalisation’ through removal.