> But as we covered [...] it’s not the case that homelessness is high where vacancy rates are high.
I wonder if the author is willfully ignorant here. The point leftists are making is not that of correlation and causation, but that of the lack of political will. The point is that we could solve homelessness today if there was a political will. The point is usually along the lines of: “Homelessness is a really solvable problem, see if we used all the vacant housing we could house every single homeless person, sometimes many times over”. There is no correlation nor causation in this argument. And the point is so obvious I can’t imagine how the author got their reading into it, other then blanket dismissal of arguments from the political left.
> I know it’s a little bit counterintuitive to people, but in a broad sense, the biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos.
> market-rate housing generates tax revenue by bringing in new affluent residents, and that revenue can be used to finance an affordable housing trust fund or new public housing or whatever else you want.
Here we go. The author seems to be proposing a trickle-down theory of housing. I’m not an economist but I’ve heard that trickle down theory is not the best economic theory we have. In fact I was under the impression that such theories were heavily biased by willful thinking, and have no basis in reality.
If this were to be true there would need to be a political will to actually spend the hopefully increased tax revenue on housing, however we have no reason to believe that would be the case. And that goes back to the author’s misinterpretation in the previous quotes. If there was a political will, governments would buy up the existing vacant housing and use them to house the homeless.