Jake, I get the argument. Fifty years of bad housing policy have yielded high housing prices today, high housing prices leads to homelessness, and homelessness leads to drug abuse. Fixing housing policy now will lead to lower housing prices, homelessness, and drug abuse in the future.

So we should fix housing policy. Ok.

That seems very reasonable and logical, except that no one seems to know how to actually make housing policy changes happen. You write a (interesting and informative) blog post about Proposition HHH, Matt Yglesias writes a blog post about 1950s boarding houses, PhDs at Zillow churn out peer-reviewed papers, and LA voters even throw $1,200,000,000 at Proposition HHH -- and yet the problem gets worse and worse.

You write that the "homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform". Well, what if zoning reform is also intractable?

Focusing exclusively on fixing housing policy, which appears to be intractable for the foreseeable future, is a mistake. We should be focusing on drug abuse as well, which is a very serious problem in LA.