Posted on 04/02/2011 2:11:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
There are several counties in America, each with more than 10,000 homes, which have vacancy rates above 55%. The rate is above 60% in several.
Most people who follow unemployment and the housing crisis would expect high vacancy rates in hard-hit states including Nevada, Florida and Arizona. They were among the fastest growing areas from 2000 to 2010. Disaster struck once economic growth ended.
Palm Coast, Florida, Las Vegas, Nevada and Cape Coral, Florida were all among the former high fliers. Many large counties which have 20% or higher occupancy rates are in these same regions. Lee County, Florida, Yuma County, Arizona, Mohave County, Arizona, and Osceola, Florida each had a precipitous drop in home prices and increases in vacancy rates as homebuyers disappeared when the economy went south.
1. Lake County, Michigan
Number of Homes: 14,966 Vacancy Rate: 66% Population: 11,014
Lake County is located in central Michigan, a few hour’s drive from the industrial cities of Flint, Pontiac and Detroit. It is in the heart of the state’s fishing district and has been a vacation destination since the early years of the car industry. Many of those second home owners are now gone. This has helped drive nearly 20% of the residents below the poverty level and the median household income to under $27,000 a year.
2. Vilas County, Wisconsin
Number of homes: 25,116 Vacancy Rate: 62% Population: 21,919
Vilas County is located at the uppermost part of Wisconsin, near the border of the Northern Peninsula of Michigan. The county is plagued by two things. The first is that it has been a tourist area for Wisconsin residents. The second is that a significant part of the county’s economy depends on the logging, forestry and construction industries, each of which struggled during the recession.
3. Summit County, Colorado
Number of homes: 29,842 Vacancy rate: 61% Population: 26,843
Summit County sits northwest of the Pike National Forest and due west of Denver. The area is near to several major ski resorts. The local paper reports on revenue “The decrease isn’t linked to the dramatic dip in assessed property values in Summit County, expected to be near 20 percent lower than in the previous valuation period. Those changes will show up in property tax bills starting in 2011.”
4. Worcester County, Maryland
Number of homes: 55,749 Vacancy rate: 60% Population: 49,274
The Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation recently estimated that the county would have a sharp drop in its tax base in fiscal year 2012 and “another, more drastic, revenue decrease” for the fiscal year that follows. The twin engines of county’s economy are tourism and agriculture. Experts believe the tourism business in Maryland’s Eastern Shore could stay crippled for years.
5. Mono County, California
Number of homes: 13,912 Vacancy rate: 59% Population: 12,774
Mono County sits near the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite National Parks. Ironically, Bodie, the official state gold rush ghost town, is in Mono County. Finance Director Brian Muir recently said he expected another property drop in property tax receipts. Like most of the other counties on this list, tourism is a major source of revenue for its economy.
6. Dare County North Carolina
Number of homes: 33,492 Vacancy Rate: 57% Population: 95,828
Dare County includes the northern-most parts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The situation in the vacation area is so severe that the “Outer Banks Voice” recently wrote, “If Dare County Manager Bobby Outten was intending to sound an alarm by suggesting that the EMS helicopter and school nurses were expendable in the next budget, he probably succeeded.” His comments are unlikely to be terribly different from those of other executives of counties on the list. Vacant homes and homes which lose double-digit amounts of their value each year irreparably undermine the tax base. And, as services fall, fewer potential homeowners will consider investing in the area.
7. Dukes County, Massachusetts
Number of homes: 17,188 Vacancy Rate: 57% Population: 15,527
Dukes County encompasses the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The enemy of the local budget is, as is true for most of the counties on this list, falling property values. Vacationers still flock to the resort island in the summer as do seasonal workers. The county is close to deserted when the weather turns cold.
8. Sawyer County, Wisconsin
Number of homes: 15,975 Vacancy Rate: 56% Population: 17,117
The Sawyer County website has a link, prominently placed on the homepage, which goes to a list of foreclosed homes for sales by the sheriff’s department. There are not many new homebuyers. The number of people who live in the county was flat from 2000 to 2010. The Hayward Community School District, located in Sawyer, will probably close one of its elementary schools. Sawyer is a fishing and biking destination, and has suffered from a drop in travelers from the southern part of the state.
9. Burnett County, Wisconsin
Number of homes: 15,278 Vacancy Rate: 55% Population: 16,196
Burnett County is at the western most part of Wisconsin near Minneapolis. The county’s population fell from 2000 to 2010. County Administrator Candace Fitzgerald recently said that proposed budget cuts “could prove to be devastating and very hard to recover from.” The county’s attractiveness as a tourist destination has faltered. Home values have fallen for three consecutive years. Cuts in the Wisconsin State budget will lower state aid. People are more likely to default and abandon vacation homes than their primary residences. This has probably been an important reason vacancy rates in rural tourist areas in Wisconsin are so high.
10. Aitkin County, Minnesota
Number of homes: 16,029 Vacancy rate: 54% Population: 15,736
Aitkin County offers visitors two seasons for recreation. The first is in the summer when fishing is popular. The second is winter when snowmobilers come north. Aitkin is the last of the counties on the 24/7 Wall St. list demonstrating that rural regions which rely on tourists are especially exposed to economic hardship in a recession. They may take longer to recover than some industrialized cities do.
I’m not sure what the point is of the article. Looks like each of the 10 “ghost towns” is a vacation/tourist area that has always had an off-season. These are “ghost towns” off-season in any event. I gather the point is that people are unloading their vacation/second homes and therefore there is a huge inventory of vacant homes in these areas.
These areas pale next to places like Las Vegas and others that have immense “ghost towns” of incomplete new developments that were meant to be the owners primary residences.
Actually Mono County sits right in the middle of the Sierra Nevada with 14,000' peaks.
Two of the three killed off by lefty green jihad
I have family connections in Sawyer County, Wisconsin. Most of the empty homes are summer homes that were built by people from Minneapolis. People said they were crazy to build million dollar homes where the economy could not support them. The local real estate market has gone down, but hasn't hit bottom yet. You might find a good deal if you are retired or have another independent means of support. Notice how there are nearly as many homes as residents? That is a pretty good clue that most of the empty homes are vacation homes.
What a strange article. It uses census data to claim that houses are vacant. Well, most of those houses may be second homes, and we don’t want people to be counted twice. If they are seasonal rental properties, again they would most likely not have a tenant on April 1, 2010.
For example, Worcester County, Md includes Ocean City, a hugely popular summer resort. So 49000+ people show up in 19000+ households on the census, in a county that has 55000 housing units. Almost all of the “empty” housing units are fully occupied in the summer by people who live elsewhere.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/24/24047.html
Friggin leeches.
Those unions are killing Wisconsin.
Yes. I don’t know what the point of the article is either.
Martha’s VIneyard (Dukes County-MA) has always been like that - the running joke for decades is that the island raises up a foot when the tourists leave.
Every town on the island shuts down at 5pm there and off season when I was young the most fun you’d get as a kid was watching the A&P truck unload at the store - now that was exciting!
There are something like 4 counties in Michigan with less than 10,000 people. According to the recent census results they were among the counties with growing populations. Keweenaw county has less than 2500 people.
Frankly, the sparsely populated upper peninsula is my kind of place. Incidentally the Bing background photo today is from the UP.
I was wrong. It was 9 counties with less than 10,000 in them.
As for the point of the article ... I kind of appreciate that it wasn't trying to make one. As far as I'm concerned, it was just giving me interesting information to compute. If there was a point, it was that property tax receipts for the counties were taking a drop because the tax is based on the value of the property, and as the property value drops, so does county funding, and so county-run things are closing, etc. I say -- fine with me. People can be self-sufficient in most of the areas the county government gets into, anyway, with the exception of law enforcement.
Real estate prices are fascinating things. I noted that all those presumably scenically lovely places had seasons, times of year when it's not a place for pleasantness. Second homes in tourist areas that are temperate year-round ... I don't see any on that list, including Florida, where humid summers are plain gruelling.
The inland portion of Dare County, NC would qualify. The islands are breezy and cooler than the southeastern coastal summer norm, though. The Labrador Current is cold. It clashes with the bathwater of the Gulf Stream at Cape Hatteras, which is in Dare County.
Yup, the census counts seasonal second homes as vacant. Maine has a lot of those. According to the Census, 22% of all the homes in Maine are vacant. They’re vacation homes, they’re not vacation homes for sale, or anything like that. Vacation homes. It’s completely useless except to tell us where the vacation homes are.
As for the point of the article ... I kind of appreciate that it wasn't trying to make one. As far as I'm concerned, it was just giving me interesting information to compute. If there was a point, it was that property tax receipts for the counties were taking a drop because the tax is based on the value of the property, and as the property value drops, so does county funding, and so county-run things are closing, etc. I say -- fine with me. People can be self-sufficient in most of the areas the county government gets into, anyway, with the exception of law enforcement.
Real estate prices are fascinating things. I noted that all those presumably scenically lovely places with high vacancy rates had seasons, times of year when it's definitely not a place for pleasantness. Naturally those places have higher occupancy certain seasons than others, and we expect that, but they're also experiencing higher vacancies than average, presumably.
High vacancy rates in tourist areas that are temperate year-round ... I don't see any on that list; Florida doesn't qualify because its humid summers are plain gruelling. What's my point? Weather has a whole helluva lot to do with the "location, location, location" mantra of real estate. At least, that's how it looks to me.
Which is why we vacation farther south. Bill and Tom would love to go hang-gliding on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, but the little kids need to be able to go in the water, or we might as well stay home and clean the baseboards with toothbrushes.
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