I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018) (opens in new tab)

A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k (https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no.

I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.

Building new towns is hard because you need jobs nearby and there's no guarantee they'll materialize to a large enough degree to support the town.

I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?

That, and reduce the immigration ffs. Importing a city-sized population (500k+) every year? - Sorry mate, you just won't be able to build a new city every year.

I’ve been closely involved with one of the largest shelter providers in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of years and I can say this is not true for the vast majority of people we serve. The primary causes of homelessness for those people are getting evicted because of a temporary financial crunch (health issue, lost a job, etc), domestic issues (leaving a domestic violence situation) or legal issues (refugees, etc). I had a similar belief (that substance and mental instability) prior to working with this organization because the visibly homeless people I saw seemed to fall into that category so I fell into this bias. However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.

It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas

I see this take a lot but it's a very static take on homelessness.

Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.

Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.

> rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem.

It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.

Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.

https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...

As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).

https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...

You'll get mental issues if you sleep under a bridge for a while. You see, homelessness is a very low-status existence. Hormone levels mirror it and make your mind to be low-status. It changes your behavior in perceptible ways. Like a position of leadership changes a personality of people by adjusting their hormone levels, so a position of low-status omega do.

It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.

Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.

In my experience among young people sometimes homelessness is also just living with some friends, moving between friends places or some random locations, with most of your stuff being stored somewhere, without having permanent place to stay for long periods of time (like a year), and that’s usually because of affordability and availability.

It's mostly the cost of housing. The rate of homelessness goes up and down in direct relation to the cost of housing as a fraction of median income. What you also see is places with high rates of drug addiction and mental illness, but low rates of homelessness like West Virginia. Because housing costs are low there. Even a drug addict can scrape together enough to stay dry.

What you are seeing is that when the cost of housing goes up it's the people on the margins of society who are pushed onto the streets first and have the hardest time getting back into stable housing. That doesn't mean the cost of housing wasn't the driving force.

It probably doesn’t help that landlords (and sometimes even flatmates) basically want you to get a security clearance, proof that you could afford to buy the house outright, and a commitment to rent for at least a year.

Putting in a plug for a great book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. https://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0...

This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.

For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.

> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.

While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.

The housing first initiative proved definitively that all secondary factors are much more treatable when the subject is housed. The societal cost of housing is way less than dealing with all the problems caused by people being unhoused.

A huge number of people end up on the street by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore. We tell ourselves it’s substance abuse, so we can pretend it’s their own fault and couldn’t happen to us

That was my reaction. Nimbyism is an easy scapegoat, and is a factor, but the problem is much more complex.

For example, there is a rental cartel operating in the USA.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

AirBnB is a factor.

I'm not sure what your experience is. To your 2nd point, I googled "homelessness studies" and here's some stuff I found:

The bulk of homelessness is a housing problem [0]. Per-capita rates are the highest in the most expensive places to live. This isn't because homeless people migrate to the places w/ the best homelessness programs either: they're largely long-term residents of their cities [1]. Homelessness is increasing because incomes are not keeping up with housing costs [2]. Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%. While severe illness can lead to homelessness, it also works the other way around [3]. There are many homeless families, often headed by women but many are also "intact" families [4]. People of color are also dramatically overrepresented: Black Americans are 13% of the population but 40% of the homeless [5]. It's hard to imagine Black Americans are 3x more likely to have severe mental illness or addiction problems.

I think it's pretty conclusively a housing cost problem. Maybe not entirely, maybe not everywhere, but it does seem like we'd take care of most of the problem in most places by bringing down housing costs.

(n.b. the NIH book source is from 1988, but I found most of its basic findings were corroborated by more recent sources)

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex....

[2]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

[3]: https://community.solutions/research-posts/the-costs-and-har...

[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex...

[5]: https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/raci...

> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

There is a well demonstrated and strong correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. There are absolutely cases where the root cause is pre-existing mental health issues or substance abuse but it is simply not true to say that housing costs are rarely the problem.

Further, homelessness can cause substance abuse and mental health issues. So even if you can look at somebody today and say "wow that person has a massive addiction to meth and clearly just giving them a roof won't solve everything" this does not mean that the reason they became homeless in the first place was a substance addiction.

Building more housing will not solve all homelessness. Frankly, so what? Almost no problem on the planet is solved by a single thing. It'll solve a substantial portion of homelessness. That's still good.

I very much agree. This is how I feel too in regards to this "abundance liberalism": some people think they can fix the whole country by deregulating zoning laws and tweaking a few numbers. It seems foolish to me. Whatever the solution is, I am convinced it requires (re)building actual social nets and welfare.

While there's some things that's can be done in the political and legislation spheres, there's a lot more need for just basic human relationships. Talking to those people and making friendships with those who different than you, and might be a little scary or uncomfortable. I suspect a lot of out social and political problems could be solved were we to get off of these shiny screens and spend time being in our bodies, building relationships with real people who don't fit all of our lofty ideals

Switzerland ships the homeless by bus to other European capitals for free.

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/swiss-city-offers-beggars-one-way...

In Dublin on 1st of February 2025 there were 1200 properties available to rent in a city of 1.5 million.

How is public transport to nearby commuter towns? If it's affordable/convenient/reasonably quick that can help a lot, I suspect. (But am quite ignorant so appreciate correction!)

> but don't really have a homeless problem for some reason.

You border security and permit system kicks out anyone with even a remote chance to become homeless, you're welcome.

There is definitely a large homelessness problem in Zurich. Maybe you just don't go outside?

I'm not sure where you live, maybe that could help in your area.

But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.

This does NOTHING to help homelessness...

When you have moderate Democrats (who say they want to solve the housing crisis for the poor and lower middle class) and fiscal conservative Republicans both championing "deregulation" and "abundance"(?) in the abstract while being cheerled by the same group of billionaires and private equity firms, you know one of them is the sucker.

hint: its not the fiscal conservatives, billionaires or private equity firms.

Those guys will say, "Hey, thanks for getting these poor folk to vote against their interest. We'll take it from here and proceed to build the luxury buildings that were too annoying to build before instead of those unseemly affordable housing projects."

Last year, in my state, the legislature outlawed being homeless by defining it as the crime of "unlawful camping" [0]. It allows for sleeping in your car if and only if the registration and insurance are current AND you move the car every 12 hours. You can also use violence to defend your property against "unlawful campers" and/or squatters and/or people whose lease/rental period has expired.

0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb5.html the 2024 "crime bill".

Came here to say exactly this.

People living in their cars is a kind of shadow population that is almost impossible to count. I lived in a small-ish town with literally a handful of the type of homelessness we normally think of, yet at least once per month I would see someone getting gas that was clearly living in their car, and this was at a really cheap gas station nowhere near the interstate, so it was locals who knew where to get gas.

This is a scapegoat at best in areas with high homelessness. The mentally ill and drug abusers are the most visible part of the homeless population not all the homeless population. There are also complex relations to cause vs effect where mental illness may be at manageable levels until a crisis like homelessness exacerbates it or drug use may be a result of being homeless instead of a cause.

Not every homeless person has mental health issues. And most probably those with mental health issues _because_ they are homeless.

Rounding all the homeless up into an asylum is just sweeping the problem under the carpet.

We need something in the middle. The ability to be a functional adult is forced into being a binary thing. You either succeed, or you crash and burn down into being homeless, institutionalized, etc.

There really aren't many ways to meet halfway - to have living spaces where you can live up to your abilities and have safety nets for the areas where you struggle. We have "halfway houses" to help people re-enter society after crashing, but not much to catch people before they fall.

(We do have some programs that try to help, but they are swamped, or inefficient, either expensive or under-funded, or some combination of those things. )

West Virginia is literally the demonstration that this sentiment is completely wrong. They have a higher drug abuse rate than California, but effectively do not have homelessness at any rate that we do… because you can get a place to live for very, very little money.

It is very obvious that the housing availability is a major factor.

Kind of a pointless stance when trying to build that support infrastructure walks you into the same NIMBY-wall.

For some people, a kind of assisted living is available - independent apartments, but with a social worker visiting once a week or a few times a week if necessary.

Of course, who will pay for it? There's plenty of money but it's all in corporations and shareholders.

I don't think housing will hurt the people with mental health issues and addiction problems.

Being homeless makes peoples mental health issues massively worst then whatever there was before. So yes, housing actually helps people with mental health issues.

And yes, as housing becomes less available, people with mental health issues are among the worst affected.

It is a big problem in Democratic states like California, where the leftists (Dean Preston and other leftist NIMBYs) have allied themselves with homeowner liberals to make it impossible to build housing.

Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.

There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.

Is any of it affordable for the median household income in your area? If so, that’s great!

No homeless people in Nashville?

It already was common.

How about in Singaporean Dollars? The Signapore housing market is centrally organized by the government, so the problem is not universal, it just takes a government not bought by capitalist interests against housing policy for their citizens.

I think that's not necessarily the most important question. A more important one is "are more homes (dwellings) the easiest way to reduce homelessness?", and "do more dwellings reduce the number of rough sleepers?", to which the answer is "yes". During Covid lockdowns, the UK housed all street-homeless people at four days notice (other countries did this too). This was possible because of the sudden availability of hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms.

For at least a little while, a massive influx of supply of dwellings entirely eliminated rough sleeping in the UK, mitigating the harshest impacts of homelessness for thousands.

Yes. https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

When you examine an island of critical business development with desperate need for workforce yes, otherwise you will mostly find rent and prices that compromise life conditions. Basic needs aren't a market you can easily disrupt (unless you plan to let a class of slaves or poors be created).

There should always be a surplus of homes, the point is to get a sufficient surplus in the places that are in demand that this places downward pressure on prices, aka competition.

Six generations ago, over 80% of Americans worked in farming. Owning your family's farmland made sense as a means to even out the land you farmed versus the land you owned. As farming industrialized, became more efficient, and food became readily available with less than 2% of Americans working in farming. In that world, the amount of farmland you needed to personally own to offset the amount you personally farmed was zero.

Will the same happen for housing? Everyone starts out naturally "short" one unit of housing. To gain housing, you can rent or buy it. Buying it puts you "even" in the same way as above: your ownership and your usage is in balance.

I don't see the factor that would cause people to stop wanting personal housing land.

It is humor. I don't watch south park to be persuaded for example.

Also kind of the simplicity of the problem: You have homeless -> give them homes = no more homeless. Just build a shit ton of public housing. It really doesn't help the liberals argument that in the last 40 years, China raised 800 million people out of poverty. [1]

[1] according to the communists at the world bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

I mean vacancy taxes will help, but the only reason why “investment properties” even exist is because of the intentional, artificial housing shortage.

Houses are deteriorating assets that only gain their wealth because of the land value appreciation. If you can just build new housing, there is no reason to hoard the existing housing, because your neighbors might try and capture that value before you can.

The issue is skewed supply and demand. If it’s profitable to buy housing as an investment, lower to middle class folk can’t compete with the upper class and businesses in the purchasing power, no matter how much housing gets build. I’m not sure whether there’s a good solution to this problem.

I need to dig out the link, but there is a Study from Finland that shows this is incorrect:

As housing stock quality improves, everyone upgrades. Which leaves room at the bottom level to get on the ladder into lower quality cheaper housing.

Also supply and demand: if prices are increasing it is mostly because supply is not keeping up with demand.

Lastly, like all other products in a market, we should see a general improvement in quality, this isn't a bad thing (think how cars how 10x more reliable, comfortable and fuel efficient than they used to be).

Various studies have found that even building expensive housing reduces rents for the entire market as it pushes people with more money into the new housing and reduces upward price pressure on older housing. Yes, it'd be good to build housing of all types. But even just building luxury apartments or whatever has an effect.

> From what I have seen there isn't a housing shortage as much as an "affordable housing" shortage.

It's generally much more illegal to build cheap housing, both in the direct sense that building codes require all new housing to be built to extremely high standards, and the indirect sense that in places without by-right development (which is most desirable cities sadly) your neighbours are going to fight a lot more against cheap houses getting built than they'll fight against expensive houses getting built.

> Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.

Already been happening for years.

I share your frustration with only overpriced, luxury housing being built. However, I think you are misattributing the blame here. The reason why only expensive luxury housing gets built in so many areas is almost always because the local government only allows developers to build luxury apartments. If housing construction was deregulated, then actual rampant capitalism would see profit in building affordable housing and then build affordable housing. Take a look at things like ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is a pretty awesome medicine, but it isn't only for rich people now. It is very cheap and affordable. Same with cell phones.

Homeless people are people. Society has an obligation to everybody, not just me. Unless your plan is "just imprison homeless people forever" then people are going to need be around homeless people while homelessness exists.

… or crazy. I know a lot of people who’ve struggled with homelessness and they (1) have serious mental health problems and (2) usually have no insight into them.

Yes, I know the talking point that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but for the sane homelessness is usually a temporary condition, for the insane it is chronic.

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Honestly, my European perspective is that a homeless person is someone who burnt through their entire support network - family, friends, state help. If they're mentally fit, then their choices landed them on the street, not my problem, be a fucking adult. If they're not mentally fit, then they should be sent to a mental institution, because they won't function in the society no matter what you do.

Also, of course nobody wants to live with poor people. I don't buy this romantic image of poor people being fair citizens failed by the rest of the society. I moved into a poor neighborhood and immediately had my bike stolen, literally living the meme. Real estate prices are lower here exactly because it's a black immigrant neighborhood full of poor people.

Poor person? Sure. Drug addict or mentally ill? No.

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Different sources say 40 to 50% of homeless have substance abuse problems. A lot of people don't want addicts as neighbours.

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I thought it was funny. And sad.

The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".

Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).

I really want to see a whole town built in US out of commie block style high rises or Chinese dystopian ant nests, and how quickly it will devolve into a ghetto, because there’s no authoritarian arm to keep it in check.

McSweeney's seems to spread the criticism around fairly, not just scapegoating tech:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/minutes-from-the-latest-...

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-westillwork-t...

The tech industry has played an out-sized role in the economic distortions to society the article is satirising. Maybe you should take a look inside yourself just to check that you're not taking this satirical article as a personal attack.

It is not stereotype of a nerd, it is a stereotype of an enterpreneur. Those are not nerds, not even close.

I don't think it's making scapegoats per se. But Sillicon Valley has been very influential in the public discourse in the previous 1-2 decades, and huge SV (or tech in general) entrepreneurs have used their success and money to gain an outsized political influence on many of these issues. Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are some of the most obvious figures that have driven public policy discourse (and Elon Musk at least even had a direct hand in the implementation of said policies), but there are many others.

What you're seeing is a backlash to this influence, and the fairly disastrous consequences it has usually had.

I'm a SaaS founder and I have the exact same criticism of tech. America is where some of the most brilliant minds and advanced technology and trillions in VC funds go towards building ad-tech and scrolling algorithms and B2B SaaS spreadsheet replacement apps while essentials like food and housing and healthcare get worse and more expensive.

Follow-up:

All these replies missed my point. I’m not saying tech is blameless, rather that the press constantly criticizes tech for both doing too much and doing nothing and not fixing society. I would argue that this is toxic and ignores the agency of literally all other professions/people.

Further, to ignore the housing/etc lobbying by basically everyone else outside of tech and make it seem like SV giants control the housing crisis is just boring. Do note that most of the developed world is facing this, not just specifically SV/USA.

Nah the tech industry deserves it and it's only getting worse

I feel you there with only luxury housing being the only kind of housing being built in many areas. Honestly, a lot of it is damn ugly too. Allowing developers to construct non-luxury housing would help much more than only allowing them to build luxury housing.

Right. The solution (or part of the solution, there is no "all-around solution") is not only building more housing, but having a social structure that allows people to earn enough to afford the housing. But our society isn't set up that way. Employers want to pay as little as possible -- or feel they have to pay as little as possible to stay competitive and above water. If you're not earning a living wage, then it doesn't matter how much housing is being built.

And to say "just build so much that supply > demand and prices will drop" doesn't work, because private developers won't build housing they can't make a tidy profit on.

It's very understandable once you get into the nitty gritty economics of it, where there is no tax on unoccupied housing. F there were a substantial tax on homes that were empty, that would incentivize landlords to rent out housing instead of having it sit empty.

Literally in the title of the article "... in areas of decreasing demographics ...".

So yes if you are willing to live in areas :

- without jobs, - without healthcare - in ghost towns

How did that happen? People buy houses and then not live there like Canada? Or there is not enough people? Can I move to france and live for free pls

In Massachusetts it’s the voters themselves to blame.

Massachusetts passed a law mandating upzoning in communities well served by public transit:

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/multi-family-zoning-requir...

And town voters in certain communities have instead consistently voted down plans to move into compliance, and instead choose to endlessly sue the state to delay it:

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/27/timeline-t...

These voters aren’t hypothetical scapegoats - they’re real.

This is one of the reasons, why climate-change risks can not be priced into home prices. Take europe- after several instances, homes in mountanous regions and near small rivers/springs are to be expected to be regularly destroyed or damaged with high statistically likelihood. Examples abound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

Now, if the risk was assessed reasonable, the risk would be priced into the housing in those regions and industrial activities in these regions. Austria, germany and some other regions would see significant drops in value. Same goes for florida and california, with forrest fires and hurricanes. The market can not be rational, if your lifelihood and pension depends on it.

Luckily, your personal thoughts from first principles with zero review of the available data is not all we have to go on!

There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.

This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

There's probably almost 100 million Americans existing under rental stress. This prevents them from being able to save and invest. That means they have no insurance policy if they lose their job. If rent was lower, which it is in places that build more, then this is less likely to happen.

A lot of people become homeless even while they have jobs. They can almost make rent but then some incident happens and they get evicted. Once you've been evicted it becomes remarkably difficult to rent anywhere. Boom, now you are living in your car for the foreseeable future.

Cheaper housing helps prevent this.

> For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless.

It's not always all or nothing - sometimes you might be able to afford rent if rent were cheaper.

> For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.

"Build more homes" includes social aka public aka "affordable housing".

Speaking from a London perspective, though I'm sure a NY one is worse, not better.

> Sry lack of new houses seems doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness. If you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.

This would only make sense if the smaller houses were reasonably priced as opposed to the bigger ones. This is not the case.

And creating more housing would absolutely be a step in the right direction in terms of reducing extreme housing prices. Unless you don't believe in demand and supply economics, that is.

> Once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up

Yes but that's partly because they can't afford to rent even basic lodging, let alone afford to buy one, and a basic roof over one's head is a pivotal basic need for most things one needs to do in life.

This kind of problem rarely has a single cause but housing costs put pressure on many of them. High housing costs mean people save less and are more vulnerable to other events cascading into homelessness. They also increase stress levels because people live further away from their jobs and spend more time and money commuting while being less able to care for their families, which can have generational impacts when older kids aren’t studying because they’re taking care of younger siblings while their parents work and commute. It also inflated prices for almost everything else because businesses are paying more for their space and have to pay their workers more, too.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t also need things like better support and easily-accessible government healthcare, but we have to recognize that these things are all connected. Salt Lake City somewhat famously found immediately housing people helps with mental/substance abuse issues simply because all of the other problems in life are more approachable when you’re not sleeping on the street, missing appointments, and having your essentials stolen.

This is a ridiculously silly take. Homelessness greatly reduces your life span, it makes you many times more likely to be a victim of both crime and of police violence, and it makes many simple parts of regular society inaccessible to you.

This is one of the all time worst takes I've ever seen on HN

>it's comfortable to be homeless in a rich society

Do you know this first hand? Have you tried it?