He went back to college and became a math teacher, which he enjoys.
Long term, this will have to be addressed with tons of construction, so it should be a good trade to go into for a young person.
If your fresh new trade school grad is 20 years old, you're betting on there being 40+ years of continuous expansion. A welder can't switch to an electrician the same way a C++ programmer can switch to Rust.
This housing shortage could easily have been predicted by demographics - starting in 2003, Millenials started leaving their parents homes and forming households of their own, and starting around 2012 they entered peak house-buying years. The baby boomers are not dying off yet, and the generation that is dying off (the Silent Generation) is small. Thus, not many homes are entering the market for the number of new households being formed.
1. The housing shortage doesn't mainly manifest as homelessness, but as housed people crowding into existing places and rural people not being able to afford to move to higher paying jobs in cities. So the number of homeless is relatively small.
2. The empty houses are in depopulated rural places where there is no reason to live.
A number I see thrown around is that California is "missing" 3 million homes right now, and people keep moving in.