The average lot size for a single-family home in California is roughly 1/5 acre, so 80 acres would be somewhere around 400 homes. Probably more like 300 after accounting for streets and stuff. Three-story apartment building are around 25 units per acre.
True. We should house the ER nurses for LA in Death Valley. The line cooks at the Jack N the Box down the street can live in the Olympic mountains and the garbage collectors in NYC in the bad lands of South Dakota. Good plan!
Plenty of unemployed section 8 tenants will spend the next 40-50 years living in the same Los Angeles rent-controlled apartment. It's not necessary to have the productive members of society drive a long commute when the unemployed are living near jobs.
The notion that poor people (especially the unemployed) have the "right" to live in any neighborhood (even the most desirable) is crazy. Plenty of seniors living only on social security move out of California to a cost of living they can afford.
Others cobble together a basket of benefits like Section 8 or low income housing lottery, disability payments (spurious), free health care, subsidized utilities, and snap. They end up with the same consumption level as your nurse or line cook without any job. I'ts not easy to get on all these benefit programs. It takes a combination of luck and tenacity.
The idea that LA could just pay it's poor people to live in Adelanto wouldn't work. This needs to happen at a state or federal level.