NEWS ANALYSIS
Goodbye House, Hello Pot Plantation
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: December 10, 2011
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A MAN’S home is his castle — except when it becomes someone else’s marijuana plantation, crack den, movie set, homeless shelter, farm or public park.
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Empty From Coast to Coast
Such opportunities for conversion present themselves in the United States, which now has about 1.2 million more vacant homes than there would be in normal economic times. In fact, the depressed housing market has become a case study in how an economy adapts — if only in an early transitional phase — when one of its pillars suddenly collapses.

Foreclosures, home abandonments and devalued houses have helped to inspire creative thinkers, political protesters, opportunists and civic leaders who envision new uses for homes besides nesting.

Detroit, where nearly one in four homes is vacant, has been at the vanguard of all manner of manorial makeovers for some time now. Artists and political campaigners have adopted abandoned properties as their own nontraditional canvases, painting some empty houses bright orange or quite literally freezing them by dousing them from the roof down with hydrant water, to draw attention to the housing crisis. The Motor City’s epic housing wreckage has also inspired a couple of breathtaking photography projects.

Much of the rest of the country is following suit in adapting to the housing bust with ingenuity and audaciousness.

An Atlanta filmmaker dreamed up a post-apocalyptic indie drama set in deserted and dilapidated dwellings in and around the city. In Las Vegas, where 1 in every 171 homes has been served with a foreclosure notice, the authorities found a stretch of empty homes that had been turned into marijuana greenhouses. Some empty houses have become de facto dormitories in places like Merced, Calif., as college students opt to rent chandeliered chateaus instead of living in cramped rooms on campus.

Of course, political protesters were bound to find potent symbols in the forsaken dwellings of the downturn. And so the Occupy movement last week began an action called Occupy Our Homes in cities like Chicago and Atlanta to fight evictions and protest what the movement leaders say are unfair lending practices by banks. In Oakland, Calif., protesters seized foreclosed property and turned it into a headquarters.

Not all of the repurposing is serious. In Fresno, Calif., empty McMansion swimming pools have been covertly converted into makeshift skateboarding parks, turning someone’s dashed dreams into good, clean teenage fun.

Sometimes the unapproved abode adoptions are less wholesome, attracting criminal elements and feral animals, thereby unsettling neighbors and inspiring boomlets in security services and pest control. Wary of blight risks, many state and local governments are paying to fix up, tear down or rent out empty housing stock.

The governments of James City County, Va., and Perris, Calif., for example, are retrofitting foreclosed homes to make them more energy efficient, in the hope that weatherization will make the houses more attractive to buyers when the market does come back.

Across Ohio, Michigan and many other states, governments are simply bulldozing empty homes and replacing them with urban farms, public parks or other infrastructure. It’s little wonder houses sit unsold and empty when tighter credit requirements have most likely discouraged some 13 million households from buying homes, according to Capital Economics. As a result, rents are at record highs, prompting some homeowners to voluntarily vacate so they can rent out their homes at a tidy profit — the so-called leveraged move-out.

The Obama administration has expressed interest in increasing this shift from failed ownership to renting, and already federal programs are backing the process. Spacious homes in wealthier areas of Newport News, Va., and Antioch, Calif., have been converted to Section 8 housing, a program that subsidizes rent for low-income families by directly paying private landlords.

This is hardly the first time that overbuilding of luxury homes has meant hand-me-downs for low-income Americans, of course. Harlem was originally built up as a luxury community in the late 19th century, in anticipation of a new mass transit station’s coming to the neighborhood. Then overbuilding and subway construction delays (sound familiar?) led housing values to plummet. By the early 1900s, poor immigrants and blacks instead absorbed the excess housing and redefined the neighborhood.

Finding brand-new homeowners may also be today’s best hope for healing the depressed housing market. And as in Harlem in the early 20th century, some of those new homeowners could be immigrants. Two senators, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, have proposed a bill that would offer three-year visas to foreigners who spent at least $500,000 to buy homes in the United States. But the idea has many opponents who fear expanding the nation’s oversupply of workers (a worry not shared by a fair number of economists). Still, the supply of homegrown homeowners may expand soon anyway.

Household formation has slowed dramatically since the recession, as cash-strapped families double up and unemployed recent college graduates are unable to leave behind their parents’ couches. To judge just from demographic statistics, more than a million households that should have been formed in the last few years weren’t, according to Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics.

The tally of missing households is approximately equal to the country’s current surplus of vacant homes. The implication is that once people start getting jobs again, doubled-up families will peel off and quickly sop up a lot of that excess housing inventory.

Think of such houses as castles once again, though hardly out of a fairy tale.

Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The New York Times.
A version of this news analysis appeared in print on December 11,