We have lots of policies with adverse incentives and terrible outcomes. We routinely spend more money in the US on homeless services than it would cost to provide homes for free because homeless individuals wind up a lot sicker, etc.

It's not sufficient to show that this makes more money for the owner. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. If it costs the rest of the world too much, no, it isn't the highest and best use by any stretch of the imagination.

Edit:

See for example this hospital decided to just house a few people to lower its expenses:

https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/homeless-patients-get-n...

Please note that I am not actually for "housing first models" or free housing. I'm for market-based housing that makes sense. It's just a nutshell description of the problem space to note that just giving people housing can be cheaper than leaving them to fend for themselves.

So just to counteract the dead account arguing with you:

"The original study that generated so much headlines in the press said this was true for _temporarily_ homeless -- it would, in fact, be exorbitantly expensive to house _all_ homeless people."

Nonsense. Over 80% of homeless people on a given night are temporarily homeless. There's less than a hundred thousand chronic homeless in the entire country. $100 a week would be enough funding for a hotel, but let's drill in the point by doing the math for $200 a week. 90 thousand homeless * $200 * 52 / 320 million people. Final cost: $3 per capita per year to house every single chronically homeless person.

And that's not even getting into the strawman they made about forcing landlords to do anything.

Why should property go to the most (fiscally) productive use? Is this simply an axiom? I assert that it has bad consequences. In my city (Toronto) the tax rate is set on the assumption that land is put the "most productive use". This forces out non-profits, artists, theatres, dancers and in general everything that makes a city worth living in in favour of chain restaurants and condos.

How do you know those artists and theaters are better than the restaurants and condos? Dollars reveal true preferences, and it appears that people don't actually prefer artists, theaters, and dancers like you'd prefer. Who are you to override the preferences of the public?

I don't think that how much someone is willing to pay is a good way to measure what something's most productive use is. For one thing, it fails to account for the degree to which people have differences in what they are able to pay.

We use prices to ration access to scarce resources. What's the alternative? A command economy. Tons of historical experiments show that it doesn't work. And why shouldn't ability to pay affect the ability to access resources? What would be the point of money otherwise?

How do you know that the most productive user a resource is something other than the highest bidder? On what basis can you make that determination? Prices are universal.

I don't think that we can perfectly know what the best use of a resource is. However, I think that we can often perform better than price does. For example, it would generally be better to allocate a unit of food to people who are starving than to people who already have excess food.

Note that in some cases that won't be the optimal way to distribute the food. For example perhaps the starving person is actively hurting society while the person with excess food wanted to use the food to perform research that promotes greater food production in the future.

However, taken as a whole, allocating at least some food based on need is going to perform better than allocating all food based on price.

Because people being born in some place need somewhere to live without being displaced by hordes of locusts looking to see the sights.

You can purchase or inherit property. Nobody forces you to turn that property into an Airbnb. You have no particular right to some other property, one to which you have no ownership claim, in the city in which you happen to be born. That's not how property works.

If you think property is too expensive in your city, consider building more of it instead of imposing arbitrary restrictions on demand.

Building more housing increases population, which increases opportunity. Opportunity is the reason people flock to cities. More opportunity means greater income, means higher real estate prices.

Bollocks. Cities like Amsterdam and Barcelona are historically constricted by nature. Not everybody is born with wealthy parents, a home to inherit or a job that will pay for one. Those cities won't grow much bigger than they are, nor should they. And those that are born there have more right to live there than tourists have to monopolize the space. The only thing AirBnB does is to line their own pockets at the expense of the locals. Hotels were a thing long before AirBnB turned social housing and regular apartments into a source of income for those wealthy enough to buy up the property. It's un-ethical.

Libertarian bullshit and 'the market' have done enough damage. See also: commercial healthcare.

I agree with you, with the massive caveat that we should also stop with the zoning and permitting shenanigans and let supply rise to meet the demand. Artificially scarce supply + bid-based pricing makes for horrible times for the average tenant.

There are reasons other than zoning affecting supply. Regulations exist for a reason. While some of those reasons are of debatable merit, some are good.

You probably don't want to place housing in an industrial area. There are environmental implications that can affect public health. Likewise, you probably don't want to place a ten story apartment block in a neighborhood filled with single family housing since it is going to interfere with other property owners enjoyment of their own land.

Yet there is more than zoning to consider. Building codes raise the cost of construction, and ultimately cost of housing. Historically, parts of cities have been lost to flames because of how building were constructed (among other reasons).

Now I am not saying that all of the regulations are good. On the contrary, I believe that they are too restrictive to meet housing needs. On the other hand, you will always have someone calling shenanigans based upon the philosophy behind those regulations and how the community views that philosophy.

Fourty percent of the homes Manhattan would be illegal to build today. I would claim that not all of Manhattan is industrial or otherwise miserable.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...