I get your point: it seems like a moral good in America for people to have some inalienable (i.e. "not required to pay for") right to have some control over where they live. But it makes zero sense to have a black and white rule that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want. Do I have a right to take up residence inside your living room? Your home? Your porch? A public school's playground? The middle of an interstate? A public park? I think the reasonable answers to all of those are "no".
The US is geographically sorting itself by wealth. You used to have pricy neighborhoods but any given city generally had some amount of property available across a range of income levels. With the transition to a service economy, this is less true over time. Now entire cities are becoming uniformly expensive.
The reality is that I no longer think it's tenable to say that someone has a right to live in Manhattan regardless of their income level. The way things are going, it's probably going to be the case that the entire city limits of SF, Seattle, and NYC will go that way.
Does it suck? Yes. Can it be solved at the city level? I don't think so.
But the general housing crisis reflects a reality in which basic housing needs for a large portion of the population are either entirely unmet, or are intrinsically perilous, with risk of housing loss at any time high.
Your colourful hypo entirely fails to address that point.
I recommend again On the Media's excellent series on housing, "Scarlet E":
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...
I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
I think this can be problematic for several reasons:
It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify?
If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.
Obligation? No. A good idea? Yes. Support services are in cities, especially centers. Half of this comment page is full with "housing alone doesn't help, we need support structures for the people" - doesn't mix well with the "hey, let's just put all the undesirables on a bus and give them housing in the middle of nowhere".
The reality is that many of the visible homeless living in the city center are addicts, and they congregate in city centers, in part, because of cheap and easy access to drugs and like-minded people. In places like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, open drug use is everywhere you look now, and the city turns a blind eye to it.
Claiming that people need to remain in this environment to recover is extremely misguided.
Lower cost? That doesn't seem likely in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of real-estate, construction, labor is sky high and the housing supply is extremely limited.
Helping more people? In that sense, efficiency is meaningless if it's not efficacious. And all evidence suggests that social services in places like San Francisco and Seattle are not working well, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year.
As we've also seen, housing addicts in neighborhoods where open drug use and drug dealing is tolerated is not efficient. Yet that's exactly what happens in the Tenderloin today.
It's almost too stupid to be believed.
There's no way around this save by exclusion zones and forced concentration camps or prisons, each of which have their own exhorbitant externalities.
This will probably not happen any time soon because it's politically incorrect to effectively admit homeless people don't deserve to live in high cost of living areas, but it would certainly be more effective in helping people materially. Not to mention, people in lower cost, yet populated, areas probably don't want them there either and will fight to prevent this from happening (NIMBY).