This person is advocating boycotting Amazon and going to local grocery stores instead. What the hell? How is that better?
This reminds me of a class of housing advocates who insist a higher minimum wage or rent control will solve housing problems. No, you still have 1 unit for 1.x people; the overriding issue is supply.
As someone who lives in a housing market where at least 30% of houses + apartments are sitting empty for months/years because their owner is being irrational (i.e. unwilling to drop to a market-clearing price), "rent control" (in the form of not just preventing rents from rising, but also capping the initial lease price landlords are able to ask for) would fix a lot of things.
Of course, anyone who thought the new rules would mean they could no longer profit in the market could get out of the market, selling off their real-estate assets. There'd be no limit on purchase prices for ownership transfer. But, of course, without the hyper-inflated (even though illiquid!) rental income, the units would be inherently less valuable, so they'd lose resale value, too.
Why would this stop houses from being left empty? It seems a better idea for stopping housing being left empty is to heavily tax houses which are left empty.
You state this like it's an obvious measure; you're irrational over 2 months is my rational over 2 years.
Vancouver was absolutely booming in February after some of the steam was released in late 2019. Those vacancies are primarily because owners are using the house as a value store. How would caps on initial rental rates help at all? Those same owners would just never list them.
Rather than arbirtrarily cutting owners off at the knees, forcing them out, it would seem easier if you just left the area.
The homeless bit is a false dilemma. While housing the homeless can be cheaper than the services they require from living on the street, luxury condos aren't making them homeless, and freed up inventory won't go to them, it will go to someone making six figures with too many roommates.
Homelessness is incredibly tricky because there are different causes of homelessness. There's struggling service sector workers living out of their cars, but there are also homeless with severe mental health issues and drug addictions (cue the SF Civic Center Bart station video). Housing them somewhere could make sense, and it's an inefficient use of money to do it in urban centers, but at the same time, it feels unethical to put the problem out-of-sigh in some remote ghetto. That, and you need coordination for any sort of homeless policy like that so cities don't start busing their homeless elsewhere.
While luxury condos don't "make" homeless people homeless; they're just a graphic depiction of how flagrantly housing prioritizes profit over the actual use value of housing people. And they could make homeless people not homeless if we had a sane system.
As for support for homeless people, I agree that it's tricky and we shouldn't just shove them somewhere, but it's not insurmountable EXCEPT when systems for supporting people are systematically defunded and people are kept without the support/job/community they need. And that's the case everywhere. It seems much harder than it is because it's impossible to solve within unrestrained capitalism, which is the natural state capitalism slides towards all the time.
As one final point, it isn't inefficient in any real sense to have people live in cities. In fact, with reasonable infrastructure (admittedly nonexistent in the US), it is much more efficient in terms of any real resources for people to live densely, especially if they need support. The only way in which it is inefficient is that landlords and profiteers siphon wealth away and drive costs up to the sky. This is a solvable problem but it is a problem of capitalist market anarchy, just like cities busing their homeless away.