Honestly it is a crazy idea unless you did the math and can show that the inevitable losses are outweighed by the gains, which is possible but seems unlikely.

The real estate game is a curious one. Money parked in us real estate provides lending income to banks in the form of mortgages, and they are locked in the us economy until the properties are sold. Yet of course we have a current housing crisis where we aren't creating enough homes to meet demand, and here's the fucky part: if we created more homes, that would screw with real estate values for existing investors and some may even fall into default, losing their investment.

To meet housing demand, after the new deal and prior to Vietnam, the govt subsidized home building which generated a profit of 2-3 percent. At that time housing consumed 13-20 percent of most Americans annual earnings. Then we created a new investment called reits, real estate investment trusts, which promise profit levels of 10 percent or more, and after the unfunded Vietnam war which wasn't paid for by new taxes or rationing unlike Korea or WW2, wherein the us govt had to compete with the us consumer for oil, gas, steel, etc, which caused rapid inflation, a lot of money went into these reits instead of other investments. Public home building was cancelled, and today most Americans spend between 30-40 percent of their annual earnings on housing, with landlords sopping up most of the rewards for creating the modern world, which unfortunately mostly get reinvested into more expensive real estate that paradoxically fights against new building of homes and transportation as that would lower the price of existing real estate through competition.

Nevertheless.

The price of building a single individual rental unit can be as high as 400k per unit.

So I propose a different and differently risky solution, multi level parking structures with ev charging, located near gyms and markets with surveillance, not explicitly marketed towards the homeless.

..

A small EV during covid could cost as little as 3k used and provides ac and enough room for a bed, fridge, etc, and neither your primary vehicle nor your primary home counts against your ability to receive financial assistance (in most states).

An individual parking space will cost about 30-50k per space:

20-30k for the building, 5-10k for the land, 5-10k for level 2 charging, adding up to about:

11M for a 440 space parking structure, just for the structure itself, 5M for the land, 5M to add level 2 charging...

Adding up to about 21M for 440 parking spaces that can sell power at low cost for cooking, cooling, water harvesting, etc

Vs 220M for a public housing complex with 440 units that the renters will feel no attachment to and may vandalize.

So it's less than 1/10th the cost, and the car owners will be attached to their cars but not necessarily the land so they can feel free to move to wherever the best prospects are. Hell with a solar canopy, an EV can be the start of a homestead.

Incidentally you can lease a brand new small EV like a Fiat 500 for about 50 dollars a month (all in, including the 7.5k federal tax credit and the introductory rate of 10 dollars a month), and make it yours for another 10k (including the 4k federal tax credit for used evs which can only be used once every 3 years).

Incidentally also there are services that can give you local residential addresses for mail for jobs at about 10 dollars a month, and there are free services that check if the addresses you can buy are listed as commercial or residential.

A cheap smartphone can be bought for 20 dollars, and cheap cell service starts at 6 dollars a month.

The parking structure suggestion would probably piss off a lot of anti car people, but once you're parked and paying for parking and charging, you can use a small folding bike like a brompton clone to get around town. I mention the brompton specifically because it can convert into a small shopping cart that you can wheel straight into the store.

Ez pz.

Admittedly it's hard to get started if you have absolutely nothing, but if you're willing to get a little creative and work at bettering your own situation, you should be able to pay for a very cheap used car after a month of work, and then after a few more months upgrade to a small EV.

If you can manage to save 50 percent of your minimum wage, which should be calculated based on local rent but if you don't pay for rent, after 2.5 years you will have enough for a down payment on a local 2 bed 2 bath apartment (at least before the Iran war... Haven't recalculated since) and you can rent out one of the rooms to cover most of the mortgage. You will likely need a cosigner if you only have a minimum wage job but nonetheless, with just a minimum wage job and 2.5 years of living in your car, you can have a home to your name.

And that's my crazy idea. Weird that I don't see anyone else sharing similar ideas given that it seems to solve so much for so little additional cost.