How much would home prices have to fall to make it 'affordable' and a viable option compared to homelessness? Are there really people living on the street because they can't find an apartment for $1200? But they aren't willing to move 90 miles to Merced for an $800 studio?
Another answer would be to just move the damn jobs somewhere else.
The communists were (and always have been) pretty keen on building enough apartment blocks to house everybody.
PAP is not communist but is famously unafraid of ripping off opposition party policies at the same time as crushing them by more conventional means.
They did the same thing again in the 90s with a popular party set up to protest large class sizes in schools. They took the policy, watered it down a bit and then bullied the party into nonexistence.
Singapore kind of semi works as an authoritarian country in a way no others could because of the uncomfortable proximity of its people to its rulers brings accountability that wouldnt exist elsewhere: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/13/naypyidaw-on-hudson-iso... but it's still largely run by thugs.