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There are dozens of vacant homes in US for each homeless person. The national vacancy rate is something like 10%.

In the US as a whole, sure. But the housing affordability issues aren't across the whole US: it's in specific metros. Houses in Nebraska don't solve the affordability crisis in San Francisco.

Furthermore, people aren't exactly keen on letting homeless people live in their property for free. Hotels in my city experimented with this: they got small checks for housing homeless people during COVID, when lockdown massacred the hospitality market. It was a complete disaster: the rooms were trashed and they lost more money than they received from the government.

Housing affordability issues are indeed across the whole US if you include local wage rates in the equation. The middle class simply can no longer afford the same housing as they could on a single earner wage as they could when tax rates on the rich were 70%. A lot of the problem is hedge funds grabbing up huge numbers of houses across the country and then jacking up the rents using collusion through software. At a 70٪ tax rate that money to grab up so many properties wouldn't even be there.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak...

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