If you look it up you’ll find various reports that strongly link home prices with homelessness. First hit on google, for instance: https://www.sfgate.com/bayare

If you look it up you’ll find various reports that strongly link home prices with homelessness. First hit on google, for instance: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/As-rents-rise-so-does-California-homelessness-12410366.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/As-rents-rise-so-does-Cal... To reinforce this with my own life experience, I lived in Houston for five years, and it was possible for me to buy a two bedroom condo in the core urban area for 100k. There were run down neighborhoods in some of the more industrial areas where you could buy a house for less than that, in some cases as low as 30-40k for run down housing. These neighborhoods had transit access and basic public services. There was essentially zero homelessness. Those neighborhoods aren’t glamorous, and I’m not trying to idealize them. People got out when they could. Crime was not extreme but it was higher than the rest of the city. But it turns out that even most people with mental problems could find a way to live with a roof over their head when the cost may be in the low hundreds per month. And just having a home makes the rest of the problems you’re struggling with a lot easier to tackle. Houston isn’t a beautiful city, I moved there not because I wanted to but when the recession hit because it was the only place I had a job offer. But it gets an unfair bad wrap. It turned out to be quite a nice place to live, with tons of diversity and arts and culture, and the best food scene you can imagine. It’s not the unregulated Wild West that people like to pretend it is, but in general the building codes are very simple and predictable, and for whatever reason the culture there is strongly anti-nimby (relative to the rest of the US). An extremely common pattern while I lived there was for old bungalows from the 1930’s to be bought up, demolished, and replaced by two modern townhomes. People complained that they really liked the bungalows and that the townhomes weren’t as pretty. That was probably true. But the people buying those homes were ordinary folks, teachers and firefighters and mechanics and whatnot who could afford to raise a family in the nicer more walkable parts of the city without praying for a public housing assistance lottery or anything like that. It’s bittersweet, but Houston being willing to let the cute old neighborhoods incrementally turns over into denser more modern neighborhoods is what made it a place that anyone could afford to live, and I think not coinicidentally there was a huge culture of entrepreneurship and loads of opportunity and upward mobility in the local economy.