I feel like a big part of the problem is there’s nothing between ‘insane stupidly high housing prices’ and ‘literally free’ in a lot of parts of the US? So all the people who work hard and try their best but have an income $100 a month short of being able to support themselves and all the people who refuse to work and trash any space they live in are treated exactly the same. There are a lot of homes sitting empty that would be full if the rent was like, 10-20% lower and nobody seems interested in any solution between ‘keep the rent that high’ and ‘force it down to zero’.

My proposal is that any landlord with a room that sits empty for more than a month, whatever value they set the rent at for that unoccupied space is added to the taxes they owe. Anybody with open apartments or empty houses will stop holding out for a “perfect” rich tenant and start dropping their prices, however low they need to in order to fill all the available living space.

All the relatively healthy and hardworking homeless get places to live almost instantly. The people a step below them in functionality who had given up on trying hard, because the system was rigged against them and they would never be able to succeed anyway, start to see their peers’ efforts rewarded and work harder to get into one of the suddenly-much-cheaper homes. Prices keep going down and more people start getting their lives together, until the available housing is actually full or you find a tier of destructive behavior where it’s actually cheaper for the landlord to pay for the empty rooms than to keep up with the damages.

(I don’t have a good solution for that tiny minority of people, but I’m pretty sure that any ideas you could come up with will be easier to implement on a small population of seriously troubled individuals rather than a huge population with a wide range of different needs and problems)

And if you’re paying for something, even if it’s only a little bit, you have a solid incentive to take care of it which is missing in something that was given for free, so all those newly occupied homes stay nice for the most part. And it’s a lot easier to clean up your act when that effort is directly translated into better living conditions, instead of being stuck at the bottom no matter what you do.