> First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?
This is a deep topic.
Homelessness is just one metric for an affordable housing crisis. I see estimates that there are ~80,000 homeless in NYC, being roughly 1% of the population. That's a lot and unacceptable but there's also a far bigger segment of the working poor and low-income.
I would argue that these people are less worse off in NYC than Chicago and certainly LA or SF simply because there is that transit system. Put another way: the homelessness situation would (IMHO) be significantly worse without that system.
For cities you need to consider a number of factors that play into this:
1. Minorities typically didn't have the option of moving to the suburbs post-WWII because they were excluded from purchasing or borrowing for homes;
2. Affordable neighbourhoods were demolished at a disproportionate rate to make way for freeways and interstates;
3. This all snowballed into the Great White Flight that lowered average incomes in cities, which diminished the tax base of those cities (among other things); and
4. When it suddenly became fashionable to live in cities again, those who had previously been abandoned there effectively were priced out or otherwise pushed out of their homes.
> Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there
European countries have more of a social safety net. Some quick googling claims there are 10-11,000 homeless in London out of almost 9 million people, a rate roughly 1/8th that of NYC or LA.
But "Americans just want more space" is propaganda. We don't know that because it's extremely rare for Americans to have that choice due to almost all population centers only allowing single-family homes to be built. Low-density apartments, high-density apartments, row houses and multi-family dwellings are incredibly rare in the US because it's illegal to build them almost everywhere with exceptions confined to very narrow areas.
> Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city
It enabled some people to do that, which is kind of the point.