My ski house in Vermont does absolutely nothing for the homeless people in my neighborhood in New York. If you put someone in that ski house what would it do? Sure it would put a roof over their head, but there are no jobs, no soup kitchens, no homeless resources. They would need a car whereas in New York they can walk and use mass transit. The town in VT is already strapped supporting many in their community (I do charity there as well, and let me tell you it's more dire than much of the New York area).
The solution is to house them here in the New York area where they are (and in fact New York does a better than average job of this).
As for it being a misallocation, I own a $1M apartment in NYC and a $300K house in Vermont. If I just owned a $1.3M apartment in NYC my bills would be exactly the same, there would be 1 fewer "vacant house", and the homeless would still be unhoused. The real misallocation is how much I get paid as a software engineer relative to other professions of similar difficulty. I happen to spend my fun money on a ski house instead of a boat or a bunch of vacations, but there's no moral difference between a vacation home and other leisure spending. So really you are arguing that some people shouldn't have such a surplus when there are homeless people. Maybe that's true, but it's one of the most unpopular positions in American politics and if you are an ally of the homeless it's not a fruitful argument to make.
I'm interested in modifying the system which allows for such outcomes, not managing the outcomes themselves. Please take a systems-level approach that seeks root-cause adjustment and not simply an amelioration of symptoms.
I count myself as progressive but am almost disgusted by how many progressives try to muddy the water here because they don't like to face the fact that they have to give something up to make their neighbourhood more accessible to those who are well-off people.
Anyone who doesn't take housing policy seriously on the issue of homelessness is either naive, or doesn't actually care about the issue and instead is trying to use it to push some other agenda.
Where will this person find a job? Where will this person get help organizing their lives? How will this person transport themselves? Where will this person get help for any significant issues in their lives (e.g. substance abuse, mental disorder, etc)?
This is where your "system-level approach" breaks down - you can't bring the support infrastructure for this to a small Vermony ski town and also to all the other small towns in America. This is, as your first post says, poor resource allocation.
Zoom out a bit and observe the broader systems which conspired to guide the invisible hand to allocate a largely unproductive property in Vermont to exist in the first place. I'll be very clear - I'm not advocating for unhoused people from New York to inhabit this property. If that's how you've decided to read it I implore you to go back and begin steel-manning instead.
Even high-functioning and privileged individuals seldom have their shit together 98% of the time. I can't go 5 days without doing something chillingly stupid.
It is frankly astounding that we achieve better than 98% on any homelessness metric. A long forgotten ancestral memory says: there but for the grace of God go I.
Root cause: humans stink individually but we are robust in aggregate.
In these comments you seem more concerned about lowering the number of vacant homes than lowering the number of homeless people. I feel that's the wrong approach.
We need to look and take lessons from systems that at least somewhat helped the problem. Of course, adjusting for the US situation, which might be just different. Compared, to, say Eastern Europe, I feel like US can just afford having so many homeless (e.g. free food and medicine for homeless in California). In many other countries homeless would not be able to survive, so in some weird sense we can call it a luxury, not a problem.
Out of curiosity, you do realize there are lots of countries without homelessness, right?
Really curious to learn other ways to solve the problem. What those other countries you mean?
But Japan, for instance, has very, very nearly no homeless.
No, it's a fairly recent and entirely cultural phenomenon. For one thing, there was no homelessness at all in North America before the Seventeenth century or so.