Plus with poor people being increasingly priced out of cities, you get catch 22 situations where someone can't afford rent in the city, but can't get to areas they can afford rent because no public transit there.
But this is a bigger catch 22. Those people fleeing to an area with cheaper rent will gentrify that area and make it unaffordable for the people living there now, just compounding the problem and destroying any sense of community as the ripples spread outwards from the city. The problem originates in, and can only be solved in, the cities and suburbs themselves. And there are lots of little ways to tackle the problem. Single family homes being turned into nonresidential airbnbs is an absolute scourge on the suburbs. Tax policy should make doing so uneconomical.
And then there's foreign ownership of American real estate. We will just let anyone waltz in and buy up an apartment block as an investment - and let them use loopholes to pay similar taxes to residents. The rent money is bled out of the national economy, and the landlord has zero connection to the neighborhood. I can guarantee you that a bunch of white people from America or Europe would
never in your wildest dreams be permitted by the government of China, India, or Saudi Arabia to buy out huge amounts of real estate in those countries and then rent to their citizens - why on earth do we let other countries do this to us?
Finally, look at citizens in the US using residential property as an investment - look at firms like Blackrock. It should be completely illegal for investment firms to snap up residential properties, and should be uneconomical for private citizens past a point. You have a beach house that you rent out? Fine, no extra taxes. Want to get a mountain cabin too? Okay, we'll let you pay normal. But anything beyond that, each non-residential property should have an escalating tax burden placed on it, so that if you get beyond say five properties it's pretty much impossible to break even by charging rent, and you'd make more money by selling the place. Then either a family can buy it, or another person looking for their first or second rental property would snap it up as an investment. This either makes housing available, or at least increases competition among landlords.
This really reminds me of the whole refugee debate in Europe. Everyone was talking about how to accommodate these people, but nobody brought up the only thing that would have fixed the problem: not using the CIA to fund terrorists and destabilize their country into a war zone. Taking people and just moving them to where other, often very different, people already live just causes more problems down the line, it does nothing to fix the root cause of the issue.
