I think the OP wanted you to consider the benefit that 1.7 million could have had in providing direct aid to preventing homelessness, e.g. rental assistance or job training.
No way in hell you could buy even a small building in the city for the stated purpose of homeless services for anywhere near that amount of money. Anything homeless “attracting” will have you swarmed with NIMBYs and red tape for years. It will be called a crime magnet. People will say that it will reduce property values. They will sue you to stop the project. The one thing everybody agrees on in the public review meeting is that the place to put the homeless is “not near me”. You will spend way more than $1.7m on lawyers alone for a project like this.
I'd think increasing demand would hurt everyone's bottom line, since non-assisted renters have competition with assisted renters for the same set of properties.
Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?
Funneling free money into rent, any way you structure it, will indeed raise prices unless you also build more housing.
Ironically the people fighting the hardest to funnel free money into rent are the same ones fighting the hardest to prevent new housing at all costs, under the delusional theory that "induced demand" means that the law of supply and demand is wrong and the inverse applies.
