- Tax empty houses a REALLY high amount after a month of occupancy loss. This puts extremely high pressure to get the house sold after the month. Living in your house while you sell it? No penalties.
- Make renting a house extremely painful for landlords. Renting can be replaced with new forms of community ownership - communities that own X properties in many cities and people can swap (for job relocation and other things). The Landlord business IS the oldest rent-seeking business. Buy a property, rent it out, pay nothing on it for 30 years and at the end of that - it's yours. In my opinion that should be illegal. People that disagree are landlords and people that think renting is the only way. Invent new ways to do short term house ownership. This is the startup capital of the world (HN).
- Require unused office space to become homeless shelters if unused after 6 months. Government will pay for the lease at a fixed maximum price. Get your shit leased or house the homeless.
The jist of this is that if we did things like this, we would probably have no homeless, the price of homes would come down, and everyone would have a home. In fact we would have such a huge surplus of homes, most people would be able to easily upgrade.