Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus

You're forgetting about all the two bedrooms in SF with someone sleeping in the living room where they all make six figures. And for that matter, that trickle down works for housing. As long a you increase supply that's affordable by someone, that frees up a cheaper unit. Now, this does induce demand, and as housing gets more and more affordable somewhere like SF, it draws people back in from places like Oakland.

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.

Trickle down housing doesn't work, at least at the stage of the problem we are at. Building expensive housing sometime frees up a "cheaper" unit but if the cheaper unit is unaffordable to most people, as is the case in most places that have seen massive inflation in rent costs, that doesn't do most people any good.

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.