It's odd how people pretty intuitively understand that not many people have, say, Ferraris because they're expensive, but housing? It's like some kind of 10th dimension twilight zone where the laws of supply and demand have ceased to exist. No... someone who's homeless in a city where the average house costs 1.5 million dollars must perforce have moral failings!
I mean, not to say there aren't homeless people with problems, but there are also filthy rich people with raging drug addictions in that area...
If housing prices have become unaffordable for many people in SF, there are other places on the planet. I moved out of SF 2 years ago, after living there for 7, partly due to outrageous cost.
Nobody is making the claim that supply and demand doesn't exist for housing, they're claiming that supply isn't limited to the highly sought after, geographically contained peninsula of the bay. They're also claiming that "housing first" is an absurd oversimplification of the problem, and disregards all manner of highly important factors.
This market efficiency/rational agent argument often doesn't hold up. For you, it does, because you're probably highly intelligent, highly educated, and have some baseline wealth. But at the margins, if someone has 80 IQ, perhaps has some mental health issues, doesn't know anyone anywhere outside of SF, and isn't even aware of the fact that SF is comparatively much more expensive because they've never travelled and aren't online like we are, and doesn't have the money that it takes to pick up and move, let alone the cognitive planning ability to take the required sequence of actions, they can easily fall through the cracks and become homeless.
That’s a very stupid analogy honestly. No one is forced to buy a Ferrari the way no one is forced to live in an expensive area. It’s almost like you didn’t read my entire comment. The overwhelming majority of the visibly homeless on the streets of SF aren’t even from here, I give them money and ask their story sometimes out of curiosity. Most of them came here for the drugs and social services.
And with the disability and other entitlements they receive, they could afford an apartment in another city—-but most don’t really care about housing as a priority. They like being able to live without rules and consequences and we’ve enabled that.
It holds up fine if you think about it for like two seconds. It's only possible to purchase Ferraris in San Fran, no other cheaper kind of vehicle is available. So a lot of people have no vehicle at all.
I mean, not to say there aren't homeless people with problems, but there are also filthy rich people with raging drug addictions in that area...