Wealth equality cannot save you from the basic mathematical reality that you can't uniquely assign N homes to N + 1 households. Inequality is the only thing that ever comes up in these discussions, and it's a red herring every time. Price is the mechanism by which markets exclude people, so it's the one you're going to see in a market economy. Social programs use waiting lists/lotteries/political connections, but at the end of the day it's all the pigeonhole principle.
Income inequality could be responsible for people wanting to concentrate in cities in the first place, but I'd argue this is actually the arc of humanity for millennia - America's decentralization is a mistaken aberration, and one that's ending. People who can afford to overwhelmingly choose cities.
There are enough homes in the US, as far as I know.
> I'd argue this is actually the arc of humanity for millennia - America's decentralization is a mistaken aberration, and one that's ending.
Yes, I think you're right. And I think it's generally a good thing that the suburban sprawl phase is ending.
> People who can afford to overwhelmingly choose cities.
In the past, "can afford" was generally "yes" for cities, it's just that you may have had to choose a working class neighborhood. But now we have the population density of the 2020s and the income inequality of the 1920s. The result is that the zone of affordability for many cities is now so far out that you can no longer get close enough to even be able to commute into the city.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Reducing inequality would be great, but doesn't seem likely any time soon. Maybe a larger number of smaller mini-metropolises instead of concentrating in a small number of giant ones like NYC/LA/SF/Seattle, etc.
1.8% of all homes in the U.S. are vacant[1], as compared to 0.17% of the population who are homeless.
[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf [2] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...
One thing I never see come up in these discussions is the overall increasing wealth disparity in the US.
In most of these discussions there is an unspoken moral belief that people have some level of "rights" about where they live. Most agree everyone doesn't have a moral right to their own sprawling mansion on the coast. And most agree that it's not right if someone working 40 hours a week can't afford a home anywhere in the United States.
But, between those two extremes is a continuum. My belief is that most of us grew up in a culture that placed the "right" point on that continuum somewhere between the city and neighborhood level of scale. You have the right to live in the city of your choosing, regardless of your income level. But you don't have the right to any neighborhood of your choosing. If you want to live in the most desireable street, then it's fair for you to have to pay for the luxury.
I think that's been a stable cultural point for a lot of cities in the US for many decades. New York is a good example of a city that supported people from the righest elites down to poverty-level working class.
But economic disparity has gotten so bad now that the affordability point on the continuum no longer aligns with our moral point. If you are working class, there are cities where the entire commutable region surrounding it is outside of your price point. San Francisco is one, Seattle is well on its way, LA might be.
I think much of the anger we feel comes from those two points being out of alignment. We feel that people should be able to live in the metro area of their choosing, but the economic reality is that for some cities now, they can't.
I don't think any small-scale solutions like affordable housing is going to fix this. In a country where the rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer, and the rich want to live near each other, the emergent property is large economically homogenous zones that only a few can afford to enter.