@Stout It goes beyond the mere buildings, though, doesn't it? It's about resources. I mean what good is it having 6 million boxes in a city that can comfortably house a person if the city's water storage system can only capture and retain enough water in an average year to adequately hydrate 2 million people? Or if the power generation facilities can only generate enough power to adequately meet the needs of 2 million people? Or if the agriculture industry can only produce enough food for 2 million people?
We can build more boxes, certainly, but we are facing critical shortages in many of those other dimensions, so the lack of boxes seems like just the tip of a much larger iceberg.
The only real solution I can see is to try, as best we can, to reduce the overall national population. Curtailing immigration into the country, and strongly encouraging/supporting immigration out of the country are the most obvious measures we can take in that regard.
That being said, there are certainly other steps we can take to try to reduce the homelessness shortage.
Massively increasing the construction workforce is the obvious step - and it would help to reduce unemployment, too, so it's a win-win.
The other thing we can do is to focus on creating bigger households, instead of a whole heap of 1-person households. When I was growing up, one of the most popular TV shows going was Friends - a show about 6 20-somethings all sharing an apartment together. How many 20-somethings these days share their home with 5 of their peers? Nobody seems to have roommates anymore! It seems like we're housing people all by themselves! So now we're increasing the housing demand six times over!
We should be focussing on building family clusters - medium-sized groups of like-minded people who want to all live together as an inseparable 'tribe' - and then building/finding the boxes needed to keep those families in.
