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Wait, the latest stats read that there are fewer homeless people in Japan than all of San Francisco (and definitely all of LA). That can't be right. It has to be a definition difference or they're doing something remarkably right.

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It's because GP cherry-picked a paragraph from the History section of that article and ignored the actual present per-capita homelessness rates.

No, you just misunderstood my comment. I'm not disputing that Japan has a far lower homeless rate than we do, there's likely things we can learn from them (and things we can't easily transplant), and I've always been pretty radical when it comes to land economics (the notion of owning land as an asset is absurd to me, vs having a stable claim over it but no entitlement to its increase in value). I was narrowly disputing your comment's claim that depreciating housing prices is a significant driver of low homelessness rates, using an example of a big drop in housing prices causing a spike in homelessness. The example isn't perfect, since steady-state low prices have different effects from a large shock, but my point was that the connection obviously isn't this straightforward.

Oh I see. Thanks for the elaboration. I definitely agree that large shocks are best avoided, but I do think that ceteris paribus, bringing housing prices down relative to wages would decrease homelessness.

On the other hand, there's a lot of Americans on their nth mortgage, though so any policy aimed at driving housing prices down would have to factor that in.

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