Why would you want to have two homes in the same city? It’s hard enough finding one apartment, if people go around having multiple accommodations, it’s just unfair for everyone else.
Maybe two homes in two cities? For any combination of personal/family and work related reasons? I’m just dreaming here :)
I would see people owning multiple homes in a vacation scenario. It used to be fairly common where I live for people to have a vacation home at the beach or in the mountains. These were relatively inexpensive and people would go down perhaps for a week or two in the summer and often spend long holiday weekends there also. The homes could also be rented out to other vacationers when the owners weren’t using them. Usually there would be multiple local agencies that would handle the scheduling, and in the pre-internet days they would publish booklets with a picture or two of the houses and the weekly rates that varied with peak rental season. This worked pretty well and there were usually still plenty of houses for local residents who lived there year-round and even temporary workers who just came for the peak tourism season.
This has changed in more recent years, though, especially since the pandemic. At the beach many of the cheap, small old houses have been torn down and much larger, more expensive houses have been built. Sometimes investors have even been approved to build one house on a lot, then go ahead and build duplex or even triplex homes and the towns don’t make them tear it down or give any other significant penalty. At the Outer Banks the vacation season shifted from summer to year round and investors have turned almost all available properties into short-term vacation rentals. Given the distance from the mainland this has made it difficult for seasonal workers to find housing, to the extent that some shops and restaurants have started offering housing to employees as a way to attract workers.
Of course, a vacation scenario is even less tenable at scale in an ordinary city than someplace built primarily for tourists.
