Believe me, I'm in favor of building much, much more housing than we are now, and of a more diverse kind. But by focusing on the price of housing (whether for r

Believe me, I'm in favor of building much, much more housing than we are now, and of a more diverse kind. But by focusing on the price of housing (whether for rent or purchase), I think the conversation gets wrongly shifted to how to directly address the problem of some people not having enough money to pay their rent or afford a down payment; and we inevitably descend into ineffective policies like rent control or affordable housing mandates on new construction. The supply of housing needs to drastically increase in housing-constrained places that suffer from homelessness. That means fewer zoning regulations, fewer environmental regulations, stronger rights of property owners to develop and sell or rent their property for what the market will bear, allowing "poorer" housing (like the boarding houses that Yglesias's article discusses), and so on and so forth. But you also need to convince the public that the people they see strung up on the street can be good neighbors; otherwise none of that policy change would happen. So we must also address drug addiction.