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I'm curious why you've framed your comment so. The link barely mentions Trump (just in the context of the Republican tax plan impacting government antipoverty spending) and is not written by a journalist, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Alston .

What would a president who is barely in office for a year have to do with decades of poverty development and increases in income inequality ?

I think solving the poverty crisis in the U.S. requires a few insights to become broadly accepted:

- There are many causes of this systemic poverty and no specific regulation or deregulation can fix it. Only broad systemic change can lead to genuine improvement.

- The causes and fixes of the poverty crisis are not partisan. Placing either blame or solution with one political party is uninformed and counterproductive.

- America must fix its income inequality to fix its poverty. Tax hikes for the rich are unavoidable. There are no free lunches or quick fixes. Everything has been tried before somewhere in the world and the only proven anti-poverty strategy is wealth redistribution.

- Things can always get worse, passively waiting until they do is actively contributing to the problem.

I'm curious how you can reconcile your second and third bullet points. If tax hikes on the rich are an unavoidable part of the solution, one party just rammed through a huge tax cut for the rich and the other party did everything they could to stop it. It can be argued that the Democrats don't really care about fixing income inequality and that they like to use it as a talking point more so than they like to actually make progress, but to pretend that the Republicans are anything less than a roadblock to fixing this issue seems disingenuous if you believe what you said in the third bullet point.

The reason why there are homeless in SF and other US cities is because of rent-seeking: a market failure which creates artificial scarcity in housing through zoning density restrictions, overuse of historic landmark status, and overregulation.

This is an explanation of homelessness in particular in the midst of plenty. The report was not simply a report on homelessness but on poverty. Poverty in the US has increased massively in the last twenty or thirty years. With less mass homelessness, that poverty would be harder to see but certainly be present - for examples, you could actually read the OP.

The article explicitly thanks Trump administration for cooperation. The rest of article has no mention of Trump. Problems described in article sound to be long term and unlikely to be related to Trump.

Edit: there is second mention of Trump - in relation to plan of tax cuts that make it worst. Still, it hardly counts and blaming the Trump for current situation since it is just a plan.

"The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes. It is against this background that my report is presented."

That would be "the plan". Not a cause of current state. They claim that Trumps plan will make it worst. Not that Trump caused current situation.

Another problem is the fact that all new housing tends to be semi-luxurious. No developer wants to develop affordable housing.

Which you’d think would have a downward pressure on non luxury housing

It's not that simple.

It is literally that simple.

It's not a "free" market.

You would think that there is a market for small houses on small lots that people can actually afford.

Profit margins are lower.

It's also riskier, due to how insecure low incomes are to maintain. It's a death spiral.

Seems to be the perfect place for a government to step in.

With all the free, empty land inside of major cities?

The reason there are homeless is far more complex than high rent. Anyone working a reasonable job can afford to rent a room relatively cheaply, although there are working homeless.

Unfortunately, the orgs that help the homeless are focused on self-survival by strictly focusing on the impossible cases. Having a job, being sober, and no mental illness gets no support. A lot of this is via earmarking, but there are so many elements that it's impossible to pinpoint a single reason that encompasses all things.

> The reason there are homeless is far more complex than high rent. Anyone working a reasonable job can afford to rent a room relatively cheaply,

Yeah, this is not true.

I don’t think OP meant literally rent, it’s a term “rent seeking”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking