So, yes, if you want low homelessness, you build a lot of housing and make sure that rents are low. This is true, and a good strategy.
Otherwise it’s zero sum and you create a homeless for every homeless you remove and disincentivize work.
This has happened in several US cities.
Not sure if you intended to phrase your question as you did, but if you give cash to the unhoused to rent housing, that takes supply from the bottom of the rental market if you don’t build any more.
Builders tend to build for those that can afford to pay and don’t target the bottom of the market.
Most stock of low-cost housing is due to building neglect or depopulation rather than being purpose-built, in a free market anyway.
Even if there are 10 beds and 10 people, if 9 people can afford to pay 2000 for their beds, and that last one can only afford 500, that last one is still going homeless
Because the person selling the last bed is going to want around 2000 for it, just like the other 9 are paying
Edit: and no, telling them they have to give up that bed for 500 is not a real option
More supply means their rent goes down too.
No, they aren't. They are generally run by local housing authorities with state and federal financial participation, and, in any case, there have been basically no major new public housing projects in the several decades, with many existing projects decommissioned, and public housing assistance shifting from project-based to tenant-based vouchers.
Traditional government housing projects started falling out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s as the new projects were often both viewed as worse than the slums they were supposed to replaced and failed to even replace most of the housing units that were destroyed in the urban renewal efforts that created them, and support for them was essentially completely halted by the Nixon Administration in 1973, though it is possible (though, again, rare since the 1980s) for project-based subsidized housing to be created under Section 8, as well as the (far more common) voucher-based aid under Section 8.
The world is larger than the US - state and federal level public housing can be done and it can be done well, and at a scale it's only way it can be done. The fact it hasn't in the US doesn't mean it's impossible.
It’s more complicated than that. I’m massively pro public housing. I hate living next to it.
A poorly managed emergency housing facility is just a shit show. Violence, noise, rubbish, human and animal abuse, property damage, police attendance, debt collectors, smell, rodents, animal attacks, threats, overgrown plants etc, all within the last year, at my neighbouring house. If it was ever managed properly, people might view it differently. Managing it costs money, and then people oppose the cost when it doesn’t come with more housing.
people tend to hate on the decades old, usually cheap because under heavily financial constraints Eastern bloc version, but Finland relevant to the topic of the thread to this day is heavily inspired by that kind of architecture, and a lot of modern neighborhoods being built are basically the same thing... just nice and with a bit more cash on hand.[1]
It's an eminently sane way to house people, and I'm pretty certain a lot of people everywhere would take a nice, central apartment if they could actually see that it cuts their rent and energy bills in half. In places that are used to sprawl and high costs there's just too much inertia.
[1] https://cdn.thedesignstory.com/editor/editor-fflo-1645278651...
Yeah I do agree we should build better housing now than post WW2 economies. The main point I want to make is that affordable housing is already solved.