03Bringing vacant homes back into use won’t be enough to tackle Bristol’s housing crisis

Without building more homes to address the city’s housing deficit, the deterioration in housing affordability will likely continue. What should local and national government do to address this? The following assess three options: (1) tackling vacant homes, (2) densifying in the existing urban footprint, and (3) expanding the size of the footprint out. While there are trade-offs with all three approaches, the analysis above shows that doing nothing is not a viable option.

Bringing vacant homes back into use will not address the shortfall

Bringing vacant homes back into use, as a way to quickly boost supply, is a suggestion that has been put forward recently in Bristol.⁸ This is a pretty appealing proposal – it has a low environmental impact⁹ and doesn’t require much political capital to achieve. But there are two reasons why it would do little to address the shortfall.

The first is that the share of homes that are vacant in the city is below the England average (see Figure 11). If anything, this is a sign of a lack of supply. All markets should have some degree of vacant property due to frictions in the market. That Bristol has less of this buffer underlines how supply is squeezed.¹⁰

The second is that even if the number of vacant homes was reduced to zero, this would add little to total supply. Around 7,600 homes in Bristol were vacant in 2022. While not insignificant, this one-off increase would be the equivalent to the increase in the number of homes in Bristol between 2020 and 2022. And a number of these homes are likely vacant for short periods of time as homes change hands or probate applications are processed. The share of homes that are long-term vacant is smaller still – just 0.7 per cent of stock. This is around 2,330 homes – the equivalent of seven and a half months of building in 2021.

Reducing the number of vacant houses would be positive for the supply of homes available.¹¹ But it in no way provides an alternative to doing the next two options, which are politically much more difficult.