KINGSTON, Jamaica. A housing shortage is supposed to mean there are not enough houses. Across much of the rich world, and in more of the Caribbean than is usually admitted, it means something stranger: millions of homes standing empty in the same countries where families cannot find one to rent or buy.
Japan counted 9.0 million vacant dwellings in its 2023 Housing and Land Survey, 13.8 per cent of all dwellings, the highest ever recorded. Spain’s 2021 census found 3.8 million empty homes. In Italy, 9.5 million dwellings are empty or not lived in by registered residents. The United States counted 13.7 million vacant units in 2020.
Jamaica, where Prime Minister Andrew Holness said in April that the requirement is roughly 150,000 housing units, has no published official count of its own empty homes. Rural districts across the island have them: the shuttered house of a grandmother who died without a will, the two storey block built with money from Brooklyn or Birmingham and never lived in, the downtown building nobody can afford to pull down. Nobody knows how many there are.
Nine Million Akiya
Japan’s empty houses have a name, akiya, and a long statistical record. The Statistics Bureau has run its housing survey every five years since 1948. In 1993 it found 4.48 million vacant dwellings; thirty years later the number had doubled to 9.0 million, out of 65.0 million homes.
The headline hides a distinction that matters. Almost half of those 9.0 million, 4.43 million, are flats and houses listed for rent between tenants, the ordinary churn of any housing market. Only 330,000 were for sale and 380,000 were holiday or secondary homes. The group that worries Japanese officials is the fourth: 3.85 million homes that are not for rent, not for sale and not in use. They accounted for about 370,000 of the 510,000 rise since 2018.
Why do they stay standing? Part of the answer is the tax code. Japanese land with a house on it qualifies for a residential exemption that can cut the land tax to as little as one sixth. Demolish the house and the bill rises several times over, while knocking down an ordinary wooden house costs roughly ¥1 million to ¥1.5 million. Part of it is inheritance. Many akiya belong to several heirs, some untraceable. Since April 2024 heirs have been required to register an inheritance within three years or face a fine of up to ¥100,000, and in 2023 the national government approved Kyoto’s plan for Japan’s first tax aimed at empty homes, expected to reach about 15,000 properties.
Europe’s Empty Rooms
Spain counts its empty homes in an unusual way. Its statistics institute, INE, did not knock on doors in 2021; it used electricity consumption records. A dwelling counted as empty if it had no supply contract or used less power than an average home in its municipality would use in 15 days. On that test 3,837,328 of Spain’s 26.6 million dwellings were empty, and another 2.5 million were used only occasionally.
Italy’s figure is larger and looser. Istat counts 35.6 million dwellings, of which about 26 million, 73 per cent, are occupied by residents. The other 9.5 million include second homes, homes used by people who are not registered residents, and abandoned property. France’s INSEE puts its vacant stock at 3.1 million, 8.2 per cent, up 60 per cent since 1990. Portugal’s 2021 census found 723,215 vacant dwellings, about 12 per cent. Germany’s 2022 census, by contrast, found only 4.3 per cent empty, about 1.9 million homes, and England’s council tax records show 754,264 empty dwellings, under 3 per cent of 25.8 million.
The League Table
Put the counts side by side and the scale is plain, but so is the problem of comparison. Each country defines “empty” differently, counts on a different day and, in China’s case, does not publish a figure at all.
| Rank | Country or place | Empty homes | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 65m to 80m | Range of expert estimates cited in 2023; no official count |
| 2 | United States | 13.7m | 2020 census, all vacant units incl. 4.4m seasonal |
| 3 | Italy | 9.5m | Istat 2023, not occupied by residents |
| 4 | Japan | 9.0m | 2023 Housing and Land Survey |
| 5 | Spain | 3.84m | 2021 census, electricity consumption method |
| 6 | France | 3.1m | INSEE, 1 January 2023 |
| 7 | Germany | c.1.9m | 2022 census |
| 8 | England | 754,264 | Council tax records, 2025, incl. exempt |
| 9 | Portugal | 723,215 | 2021 census |
| 10 | Puerto Rico | 334,564 | 2016 estimate, Center for Community Progress |
| 11 | Ireland | 163,433 | 2022 census, excl. 66,956 holiday homes |
| 12 | Detroit | 47,000 | Abandoned Land Bank homes in 2014 |
| n/a | Jamaica | Unknown | No published vacancy count |
Myth Check: Three Billion People and Nine Million Ruins
Three numbers about empty homes travel further than the evidence behind them. The first is that China has enough empty flats to house three billion people. It comes from He Keng, a former deputy head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, speaking in Dongguan in September 2023. What he said was that experts’ estimates varied widely and that “the most extreme” believed the vacant stock could house three billion. He said that “might be a bit much”, while adding that China’s 1.4 billion people “probably can’t fill them”. Other estimates cited in 2023 put the figure at 65 million to 80 million units. The only hard official number is narrower: at the end of 2025 developers held 402.36 million square metres of unsold new residential space, up 2.8 per cent in a year. At 100 square metres a flat, an assumption, that is roughly four million unsold homes, before counting the far larger number bought and left empty.
The second is that Japan has “nine million abandoned houses”. It does not. It has nine million vacant dwellings, of which fewer than half, 3.85 million, have no plan for use. The third is Ireland’s. Its 2022 census recorded 163,433 vacant homes, but when the Government introduced a Vacant Homes Tax, preliminary returns in November 2023 found only about 3,000 properties liable. The census records a home that is empty on one night; the tax applies only to a home occupied for fewer than 30 days in a year. Ireland has since raised the charge from three to seven times a home’s basic property tax.
When the Owner Has Died
Ireland’s census did something unusual in 2022: for the first time it asked why. Rental homes between tenants were the largest group. But more than 27,000 vacant homes, about one in six, were empty because the person who lived there had died, and nearly 11,000 more because the resident was in a nursing home or hospital.
That pattern, death followed by paralysis, runs through several of the places with the largest empty homes problems. In Japan it is untraceable co owners. In Puerto Rico, where research published by the Center for Community Progress estimated 334,564 vacant housing units in 2016, of which 257,798 were not holiday homes, the group’s research found that many properties are “excluded from the housing market because of title or estate issues”. Hurricane Maria then destroyed about 70,000 homes in 2017. In these places, empty houses are often less a sign of speculation than of paperwork that never got done.
Detroit Knocked Down 27,000
The most aggressive answer to abandonment came from Detroit. In 2014 the city’s Land Bank Authority held 47,000 abandoned houses. Over the next eleven years, with US$265 million from the federal Hardest Hit Fund and a US$250 million local bond known as Proposal N, the city demolished 26,978 of them and sold or renovated 19,080. By the final report fewer than a thousand remained.
The programme was not clean. It ran into investigations over contractors and backfill dirt, and critics argue the city demolished houses that could have been saved. Supporters point to the US$4.6 billion gain in home values since 2014 that the city, citing a University of Michigan study, credits in part to the programme. Either way, it shows that the first step is ownership: the city could act because it held the titles.
Why There Is No Honest Count for Jamaica
Jamaica’s census counts people and the places they sleep. In 2011 STATIN found 711,331 housing units, meaning buildings used for living, which contained 853,668 dwellings and 881,089 households. There were more households than dwellings, because several households can share a dwelling. What the published tables do not show is how many dwellings had no household at all.
The 2022 census, whose first results STATIN released in October 2025, showed population growth slowing to 0.24 per cent a year, the lowest rate recorded between 1970 and 2022. Kingston and St Andrew added only 10,478 people in eleven years. Preliminary 2022 results give a dwelling count for each community, but do not say how many were empty, and STATIN has not yet published a national count of empty homes. Local authorities do no better. After an earthquake in 2023, the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation could not say how many derelict buildings stood downtown, and its city engineer, Xavier Chevannes, said it lacked the people and money for the work.
Other countries show it can be done cheaply. Spain used electricity records; Jamaica Public Service and the National Water Commission hold meter records for the premises they supply. Ireland asks census enumerators to record why a dwelling is empty. Vancouver requires every owner to declare whether a home was occupied, and a false declaration costs money. Any of these would give Jamaica a first honest number.
Jamaica’s Empty House Machine
The forces that empty houses elsewhere are all present here, and some are stronger. The first is family land. The National Land Agency estimated in March 2022 that about 331,873 parcels were still unregistered, mostly rural, and that 40 per cent of properties in rural Jamaica need a certificate of title. It names “cultural norms of land ownership (family land)” as a threat to its work. A house on unregistered land, or on land still in a dead owner’s name, cannot easily be sold, mortgaged or insured. It can only wait.
The second is migration. Jamaicans abroad have long built at home, often for a retirement that comes late or never. The third is the weather. After Hurricane Melissa, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management said in November 2025 that 156,000 dwellings were damaged across six parishes, mostly in the west, with 24,000 total losses. The Planning Institute’s Economic and Social Survey put the total cost to the housing sector at J$767.8 billion, 22.9 per cent of 2024 GDP. Some of those roofs will never be replaced, because the owner is overseas, elderly or dead.
The fourth is the tax system, which is neutral to the point of indifference. Jamaica’s property tax falls on the unimproved value of land; the house on it is ignored. Unlike Japan, there is no penalty for demolishing a ruin. Unlike Vancouver or Ireland, there is no charge for keeping a home empty. The law that does bite is the Limitation of Actions Act, which gives an owner 12 years to recover land from someone in possession. Squatters and relatives use it, though the courts set a high bar: in 2024 Justice Dale Staple (Ag) ruled for an overseas owner of a Portmore house whose relatives claimed they had possessed it since 1994.
Downtown Kingston shows where this ends. In January 2020 the municipal corporation served a 24 hour demolition notice on an abandoned, fire damaged building at 18 Sutton Street, close to several schools. One resident told reporters the owner had inherited it and could not afford to knock it down.
What This Means for Jamaica
For buyers, a vacant house is a question before it is an opportunity. Who holds the title, whether an estate has been administered, and who has been in possession for how long matter more than the condition of the roof. A house that has stood empty for a decade may come with heirs abroad, unpaid property tax or a neighbour who believes the 12 year clock has run.
For policy, the argument divides. Advocates of a vacancy tax point to Vancouver, where the share of empty homes fell from 0.90 per cent in 2017 to 0.49 per cent in 2024, the tax has raised C$194.3 million for housing since 2017, and the annual owner declarations give the city exactly the count Jamaica lacks. Sceptics note that Vancouver’s vacancy was already below 1 per cent, so the tax now reaches fewer than 1,000 homes. They point to Ireland, where a census count of more than 160,000 vacant homes became about 3,000 liable for its new tax in preliminary first year returns, and argue that in Jamaica most owners of empty houses are not speculators but families who cannot sell because the paperwork is unfinished. Taxing them, they say, would punish the problem rather than solve it. On that view the better tools are cheaper probate and administration, faster titling and, for the worst ruins, a Detroit style body that can take title and clear or sell.
Both sides need the same thing first: a count. Without it, Jamaica cannot tell whether its empty houses number in the thousands or the tens of thousands, where they are, or whether they could meet any part of a 150,000 unit requirement.
The House That Waits
Every empty house was built for someone. In Japan it was a generation that has grown old; in Ireland, a parent who has died; in Detroit, factory workers who left. In Jamaica it is often all three at once: a grandmother’s house on family land, a returning resident’s dream that stayed a dream, a roof Melissa took that no one has come home to replace.
A country that counts its people but not its empty houses will keep building new homes beside the ones it already has. Jamaica’s first step is not a tax or a bulldozer. It is a number.
Method: Figures come from national statistics offices and official records: STATIN (2011 and 2022 censuses), the National Land Agency Strategic Business Plan 2022 to 2026, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management via the Jamaica Information Service, the Planning Institute of Jamaica, the Supreme Court of Jamaica, the Statistics Bureau of Japan, INE Spain, Istat, INSEE, INE Portugal, Zensus 2022, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (England), the Central Statistics Office and Department of Finance (Ireland), the US Census Bureau, the City of Detroit, the City of Vancouver, the Center for Community Progress and China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Remarks by He Keng and Kingston officials are as reported by Reuters, Fortune, the Jamaica Observer and The Gleaner. Definitions of vacancy differ between countries and the league table is not a like for like ranking. The China range is an expert estimate, not an official count; the conversion of unsold floor space to homes assumes 100 square metres a flat. Shares were calculated by Jamaica Homes News from the published counts.
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