The Vacancy Rate

Japan has nine million empty houses -- 13.8 percent of its entire housing stock, and the abandoned share is the part that keeps growing. It is not an isolated case. The Vacancy Rate traces what happens to housing markets when the driver everyone assumed was permanent -- more households every year -- starts to fail.

Drawing on Harvard's household growth projections, Japan's Housing and Land Survey, and vacancy data from Korea and Europe's emptying interior, this book follows the arithmetic from falling birth rates to the house at the end of the street: who inherits a home nobody wants to buy, why prices in some places refuse to fall even as vacancy rises, and what towns, counties, and homeowners can actually do with a growing surplus of houses and a shrinking number of people to fill them.

Part data, part on-the-ground reporting, The Vacancy Rate is a clear-eyed look at the built environment America -- and much of the developed world -- is about to inherit.