Maybe? Or how about they are in no-way comparable.Unless you are talking mass subsidization there is an absolute floor for providing housing, not to mention finite capacity for both tent cities and affordable apartments.
My first "apartment" was a 100 square foot bedroom rented in a 4 bed / 2 bath unit with 3 other residents. At the time I moved in, it was only $350/month plus utilities, in a market where the median rent for a studio was $1750/month. That room would have been affordable for a single person working full-time at minimum wage. Was it code compliant? Hell no! Was it better than living on the street or in a car? Unquestionably.
If you raise the floor to require every adult to have their own kitchen and bathroom, then you've consigned this segment of the market to homelessness. Someone who can pay $350/month certainly would need a massive subsidy to afford a $1750 studio, or you can just get out of the way and allow them to rent a room for $350.
That's called having roommates, why do call it not code compliant? It's done all the time.
The building itself was over a hundred years old, and had countless violations of modern building codes, health codes, and fire safety codes. It was pretty much a disaster waiting to happen, but it was affordable!
It's an interesting question, because I can imagine lots of possible housing solutions that would be way cheaper than $2k/month and more pleasant than living in a tent on the street. So the question is why haven't those solutions been built?
Sure. We are nowhere close to that floor. Voters who reject supply and demand pay the consequence for their ignorance.
The trouble is that local government is coerced to eliminate people who don't directly or indirectly pay a lot of property tax, especially if they are minors and require school.
The federal government should be required to pay general costs per head to local government from it's excessive collection of income tax to put an end to this nonsense of states and towns trying to evict the poor and steal the rich from each other.