[anon291]

> And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.

There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free market principles stop applying, since they presume a basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a government perspective is to remove the agency of those who are so drug addled that they cannot make good decisions.