Well, as long as you’re interested, my take is that “Work From Home” is the future and we have tons of homes that sit empty in “undesirable” cities that are only undesirable because of the lack of jobs. If there is decent internet connectivity, these could become Tech boom-towns. We have way more empty housing than we have homeless. Some groups estimate upwards of 28 empty homes per homeless person. Some of those buildings are unlivable at this point, but they still have the bones of things like plumbing and foundation to be able to rebuild relatively cheaply.

I always think of Aberdeen, Washington as a prime example. It’s been a hollowed out shell for decades since the logging industry changed in the state. It’s where Kurt Cobain was from and the hard drug scene in the poor, broken town was a big part of why he ended up an addict himself.

The thing is, Aberdeen could be beautiful and revitalized, and all it really needs is people moving there, living there, and spending money locally there. That can be solved by escaping this bullshit “Return to Office” mandate driven by established companies who don’t want to lose money on their investment in commercial real estate. Those companies need to be allowed to fail. This too big to fail shit has gone on way, way, way too long. It’s artificially reducing competition and entrenching the largest as permanent fixtures in our economy, while the quality of services and products they offer quickly goes down the toilet (See: Boeing).

Creating remote work boom-towns won’t solve current homelessness issues, but it can alleviate housing pressure by giving people an avenue to purchase a home in affordable area. Of course, corporations don’t give a shit and want to pay you less because your cost of living is less, readily admitting that the value you produce has zero bearing on how much they are willing to pay you (another fucking reason for these god damned dinosaurs to fucking die). That in itself is tied to the exploitation of workers in other countries and how we were willing to pay them according to the “local economy” instead of saying “they deserve just as much pay as a US worker.” Every time we allow corporations to export fucking bullshit to other countries, it eventually finds its way home. So, laws would need to be passed about this, but we can really only expect those on the state level.

Further, there’s the whole zoning debacle. Japan definitely helped resolve a lot of their housing affordability issues by removing zoning and having nearly anywhere be acceptable for a business to exist. This led to lots of people running businesses out of their homes, etc, and giving them more control over how they could finance their home.

Anyway, there’s lots that could be done, but a lot of it comes down to lack of political willpower and corporations wanting to wring blood from stones.