[pvdoom]

> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.

Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking

[koube]

I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth.

My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.

[pvdoom]

Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.

[Symmetry]

If houses were just a commodity to be bought and sold we'd have much less of a problem. There were very few homeless a hundred years ago. Efforts to ban residential hotels aka "flophouses" were mostly an effort to remove undesirable people from their communities by making it impossible for them to find housing there they could afford. And the fact that many if not most voters don't want housing for what they consider undesirables in their neighborhoods is a huge problem for the construction of homeless shelters and affordable housing to this day. So I don't think that even completely socializing housing would do all that much to help with the problem.

[bell-cot]

I'd phrase that "homes should be a great investment for the haves. And who cares about the have-nots, anyway?".