Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.

You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.

We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars, etc safely.

All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.

We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.

We must have sensible laws and process from those who are unhoused. Is it financial, medical, psychological, addiction, abuse, etc? Each of these has a different solution; and the law needs to have enough teeth to enforce those solutions.

It's a gradient of solutions. If you fall out of a bracket, there should be a more affordable bracket that is humane. The threat of living on the street doesn't help anything. Plus, in California alone, enough has been spent to solve the problem tenfold. I suspect devious forces at work behind that....

So we've controlled our population inputs / outputs from one vector, we've put a cap on homelessness, we now need....... affordable, mass, fast public transit.

Look, we all can't live in NY or by the beach or in all the fun places. Uprooting the entire economic system is a no go with too many unforeseen consequences. Supply is only way to possibly lower the costs in desirable places, but you are competing against the world.

The bare-minimum is that from anywhere in the country you live. You are not far from fast transportation. Bullet trains and things of that sort. That means you can actually develop farther and farther out, but still have those people participate in the main hub's economy.

If you sort those things out, you will allow people to decentralize and will force commercial entities to do the same. This will put immediate pressure on the already over-stressed commercial real estate market. Once that relents, we may see the cost for housing come down everywhere.