[dmix]

> No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing.

This is the lie told everywhere that the only real solution to affordable housing is gov spending billions on a small set of tenement buildings, that take a decade to build, and are 3x over budget. Instead of reforming municipal policies to reduce rampant NIMBYist roadblocks, rethinking zoning from the ground up, streamlining regulations to make it easier to follow and enforce the rules safely, etc etc.

None of those things require billions of dollars to be committed. Just heart, communication skills, and charisma. There's a mountain of capital and regular people ready to build new housing, lack of capital, or will, or lack of demand to build has never been the problem. To discover the root problem requires asking why it's so rare/expensive despite that reality and why it's so harder today than it was 100yrs ago.

[lotsofpulp]

I was addressing free housing (and/or mental healthcare/drug addiction treatment), not affordable housing.

Increasing supply of housing and bringing prices down is also a needed solution to prevent some people from getting to the destitute stage, and yes, that is under local control.

[dmix]

I personally don't see a distinction. It's infintiely more complicated to build public housing when people making $200k+ struggle to find a proper apartment to rent, let alone buy an actual house/condo.

Homelessness doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not the homeless in one bucket then everyone else living in the real world, where the only dichotomy we have to accept when living in a city is public housing vs paying $3k/month for rent.