We don't even need to have the government build the homes, just allowing the construction of homes would be a huge positive change.
Where are you gonna build? It's illegal to build pretty much anything in CA cities with high homelessness
Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.
You could build a lot of them for $3.7B/year though.. split among 150,000 homeless, that's $24,000 per year each
'course, it's not hard to imagine those homes ending up like the free zone in The Wire or the housing projects in Judge Dredd...