Well, easy: for a lot of people, they will improve their situation until they have a basic minimal luxury available to them. So by rising that minimum level of

Well, easy: for a lot of people, they will improve their situation until they have a basic minimal luxury available to them. So by rising that minimum level of luxury they want, you're making them work harder. The result is that the ratios are out of whack. By creating 2% homeless instead of 0.2%, you're massively increasing average luxury, and therefore making sure 20% don't live in shared housing with it's problems (e.g. everything gets stolen, especially from the weak, and of course women have some extra issues). Your argument assumes that by lowering standards you can fix things. You can, but only by creating other problems (sanitation standards going down by a lot, for one thing, which WILL result in consequences). It's pretty hard to see this until you've lived in both situations. If you want to avoid this: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/17/asia/china-beijing-rat-tribe/ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/17/asia/china-beijing-rat-tri... then you need to accept that you're also creating homeless in the process. Better solution is to ease up on the limits on expanding supply. It's not like it's construction costs preventing new buildings from going down.