[0]https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/report-how-many-homes-...
[1]https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/homelessness-sta...
This sounds like a very large number, but large compared to what? The key thing to look at is how does it compare to the past? If there's no substantial difference today in this rate versus the past, then maybe idle homes might not be the biggest factor. I don't know the answer to this or where to lookup this stat.
> There is also only over 500k homeless people in the US[1] meaning we could house each homeless person around 32 times over. I think it could make quite a large dent
Homelessness is sort of a separate and off-topic issue largely involving mental health and drug abuse and cannot be viewed as being solvable simply by using idle homes. You could give each homeless person a mansion, and many of them would be ruined beyond repair in a short amount of time due to all kinds of unfathomable reasons like very ill people using a hammer to search for demons hiding in the walls.
Of course many people would benefit from a plan to solve homelessness by being gifted a free house: among them the homeless person themselves, probably the already well-off or rich corporations like BlackRock selling it to the government for 250% market value, and the Federal employees overseeing such a fiefdom.
But simply counting empty houses and the number of homeless and observing that the number of empty houses is greater than the number of homeless isn't the framework for a solution. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has worked with the homeless and experienced why they're homeless first-hand. The number of normal people who are simply down-on-their-luck through unfortunate life events is relatively small. Many people who have been homeless longer than a very short time are not even close to being well. Many of them would destroy their free home, and I do quite literally mean that they would take it apart looking for scrap to pawn for drugs, or to destroy demons they think are hiding in the walls.
Even beyond the homeless issue, have you considered all of the costs to such a plan? I don't even mean who is going to pay money for the homes and set this up, I'm talking about the actual outcome to society. Just adding one mentally ill guy in a normal neighborhood who isn't watched 24/7 by professional help is going to utterly terrorize his neighbors. Throwing hundreds of thousands of homeless into average neighborhoods in idle homes would ruin quality of life in this country. Would you prefer living next door to the guy who collects bags of poop, the guy who likes to expose himself to strangers for fun, or the guy who who's walking around all day looking for stuff to steal and who's willing to rough you up if you look at him the wrong way? Which one of these do you want around watching your kids play?
As long as you're fine with shipping homeless people to desolate places like oklahoma, sure! There's a reason why people flock to cities even though the rent there is sky-high.