You want the population clustering into big, transit-centric cities to unwind car-dependence and avert climate change.
The current urban migration is basically a reversal to the mean and should be beneficial in the long term.
Racism absolutely played a role in how it went down, as did government policy. But the invention of the modern suburb grew directly out of the events of WW2 making it possible for the US to rapidly build large numbers of homes.
People moved away from urban centers because they believed (correctly) that living in dense cities detrimentally impacted their health. This later accelerated in part because of racial reasons.
Housing demand could have easily been met (and was met in Asia and Europe) by building denser urban structures, which is what you would expect to happen if there was a confluence of housing demand, increased wealth, and a general interest in living in cities. There was no interest in the latter, which is why suburbanization took place.
Capital naturally wants to aggregate and trickle up, not trickle down. So if most of the newly minted Fed money was injected at the bottom (instead of at the top as is the case now), it would probably flow through the whole system more efficiently.
We need a progressive tax on corporate revenue (ex > 100M 0.1%, >250M 0.3%, >500M 0.5%) so companies have to pay more if they use economies of scale to consolidate power. It should be more expensive to be big.
It is, but they can afford it because when it comes to access to capital, they're at the front of the line. When the Fed creates new money through government loans or engages in open market operations, corporations are the first entities to get a hold of that money. It's like they have pipelines that feed new Fed-generated cash straight into their bank accounts.
Just look at Oracle; their software is mostly legacy. They make all their money from huge government contracts. The government doesn't really care about how inefficient or expensive Oracle is because the money comes from taxpayers; if the government overspends, they can just get more money from the Fed.
Perhaps the government needs to create that money through UBI instead.
SROs used to be pretty commonly available. We tore down up to 80 percent of them over the course of two decades, probably because Baby Boomers were wealthy enough to not need something that cheap. We never rebuilt them.
I think rebuilding them would be a step in the right direction.
They used to be just normal rentals for people just starting out who didn't have much money. If you watch old movies or movies set in a prior era (like "A walk in the clouds"), this was normal market-rate housing for folks without tons of money. And that's mostly not the case anymore in the US.
Also, the last time I looked -- back when I actually lived in the San Francisco Bay Area well over a decade ago -- SROs in San Francisco were already more than $1000/month.
I would like to read through the several thousand page Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, but I'm having trouble finding the time. I haven't gotten very far.
I am trying to create pilot programs and find things that actually work. I would like to stop just shooting down suggestions that don't work and start saying "Well, we did x, y and z in my small town and that got such and such results and here is how you can try to replicate that." But I'm still struggling to make ends meet myself, and yadda. So it's slow going.
In my mind if you have the interest to read HackerNews you would have the skills to get a decent job that would get you off the street. I'm clearly unaware of the obstacles that prevent that and would like to learn more.
I live in South Africa and the inequality here is horrendous but most of that is due to a disparity of education. There is a shortage of skilled workers so in my mind someone with HN interests wouldn't struggle to find enough work to avoid homelessness.
Part of it is that housing policy here has serious issues. We have changed zoning, etc, such that it is nearly impossible to build the kind of walkable communities that existed in this country before the automobile took over. The New Urbanist movement tried to build walkable communities. They found it very challenging to get such plans approved at all.
Another piece is that we don't have good health care policies. Most people on the street in the US have some kind of health issue, whether medical or mental health. Our policies in the US don't do a good job of providing for such people. Most developed countries have much better policies for dealing with people with serious issues of that sort.
Here are a couple of my blogs if you want to try to read through them, though I don't know if that will really answer your question:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/
https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
I would like to see the affordable housing shortage tackled and the health care issue resolved. I think if those issues are not resolved, basic income will likely actually make things worse for poor people who will then get dismissed as not trying hard enough, not managing their UBI, etc. I think giving UBI to people in the current American climate will just mask the real problems and make people who are comfortably well off even more callous about "Not my problem. It's just a personal issue and the world isn't obligated to fix your personal issue."
I already get told on a regular basis that the housing crisis isn't really a problem. It isn't a problem for the well-heeled, so they don't see why others find it so monstrous and impossible.
Note that the University system is a form of this - and it worked! springing up "college towns" all over the country, many then creating job centers for decades.
The problem is that big cities (esp Silicon Valley) have figured out how to "poach" newly formed companies: you can have my capital, but I need you to relocate...
the problem of affordable housing is actually very simple and the solution is obvious; too many people are moving to big cities; so everyone ends up competing for increasingly limited real estate (in a desperate bid to cut their commute times to less than 2 hours per day).
One of the main reasons why so many people are moving to urban centers is because that's where all the jobs are; it's a direct result of the centralization of capital in the hands of corporations. Corporate HQs are in big cities because they want to get access to the best talent and corporations are more likely to find talent in places where there are lots of people to choose from.
One solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to encourage companies to hire remote workers. Another solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to make the economy less focused on corporate growth.
Due in a large part to corporate lobbying, whenever a politician is presented a choice between a free solution and an expensive one; they tend to pick the expensive one.