Aliens or even humans in the far future would be puzzled looking at our time and seeing overabundance of unused buildings and a lot of unhoused people at the same time and the same place.
If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.
>Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now.
May be 10-12K years. Copyright has had only 500 years and is already in turmoil. The property rights may as well be just an artifact of scarcity, similar to how copyright has been an artifact of "copy". Thus with technological progress, space exploration, etc. the property rights may get completely changed or even completely disappear, at least those property rights that we today call so. And in several thousand years the current property rights and their power over an individual well-being would be a hard to understand puzzle. Especially if the future people will get even more capable of empathy and less prone to violence, greed, etc.
>If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.
Again, in future it may be even much easier than that, and the future people would be looking at it like generation Z looks at paper maps (and that is just meager 20 years of tech progress - now compound such changes 50 times over 1000 years)
The perfect is once again the enemy of the good. People always invoke the building code to talk about Why We Can't Do Anything despite an abundance of empty commercial real estate, but the alternative is people trying to survive in broken down cars and tents.
It's a slow motion catastrophe on the scale of a natural disaster, but every attempt to address it in concrete form (ie by policymakers) is stymied by either self-styled moralists whining that it's stealth communism, or dissemblers hiding behind bureaucratic nostrums. At best you get half-assed pilot projects like tiny houses in parking lots under bridges, which only serve a small number of people and are themselves grossly insufficient.
Filling a building with homeless adds to costs, increases wear and tear, and those costs have to be borne by someone.
It’s not about perfect being the enemy of good. It is about simple costs and overhead. The homeless people obviously can’t cover basic costs. The building owners don’t have much real incentive to donate the building for use, so in the end the vacant buildings do not equate to a solution.
Large empty building which have already been constructed and fitted with internal infrastructure are significantly more useful for sheltering people than policy objectives that only exist on paper. Even a building with no services enabled is significantly better at providing shelter than a car or a tent because being inside a building minimizes exposure to wind, rain, and snow.
Thus, buying or leasing the large empty buildings makes it a lot easier to start solving the problem in a practical way.
Problem: Too much commercial real estate empty. Too much homelessness.
Solution: Why ... not put the homeless people in the empty buildings?
Them: ZOMG NOOOOOOOOOOOO
These are FACTS.