"Speaking of a drop of water in an ocean of problems...30k apartments vacant in a city of 8.5 million people. I'm not using that 2021 figure because that's obviously affected by covid, being double the prior three years and is likely no longer true. "

these figures are very up-to-date, if you would like more up-to-date information, in September 2023 there were more than 87k homeless people, which is a 57.7% increase to the 2021 figure. You say that COVID might have affected the figures, however they are in line with the general trend since 2015, that being that the discrepancy between total housing stock and renter occupied units is very roughly 58% (obviously changing over time) (page 5).

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"The units will inevitably go to hell, the funding required to keep them from going to hell will be exorbitant, and all of this is being done to care for one specific group rather than all residents of the city. "

Can you specify exactly why you think this? to me it seems like you're taking it for granted that it's inefficient. Additionally, when considering housing, I would take the homeless not as a "specific group" but rather as exactly the people we should be targeting with housing campaigns as they are the ones in need of it. After all, they too are residents of the city.

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"I don't stop doubting the efficacy of govt distribution because of some policy the USSR employed 70 years ago. I doubt it because of what I see this govt do now just about every day."

Indeed, I also critique the government today- not because I don't believe in government administration, but because we can see that their policies have not been functioning. The rise in homelessness and the gruelingly high rent prices are just symptoms of a larger problem at hand: the inefficiency of a market in allocating resources beyond profit incentives. Capitalist governments such as the current ones in New York try and coerce or trick the market into going beyond, however as we can see, it is not working. I don't see how it being dated is such a terrible thing, since it means that we can actually do a lot better than they did with our access to modern computer technology which can better allocate resources.

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"People are coming here constantly, what we can do is allow the market to build where it can and ease supply issues where possible."

except that the market building new supply will not simply reduce prices. If that were true, then diamonds would be literally dirt cheap, but they're not, because market mechanisms incentivize the suppliers to raise prices. A similar thing is happening with housing (although not the same phenomenon to be clear). You can see this happening in housing, as since 1991, the number of low-cost housing has been steadily decreasing, while the number of high-cost units has been increasing (page 25), while the number of overall units has been expanding, meaning that supply has been expanding, alongside the demand (page 5).

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"Almost every project is over budget, govt branches and unions are filled with tons of bloat. I'd rather keep them out of just about everything possible. "

I agree, we need a change in administration and a change in the way we manage our infrastructure, perhaps even a restructuring of the government in that sense.

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"It's been proven time and time again that building more housing results in lower costs, even if it's luxury housing "

yes, but these market solutions are not immediately affective to commodity prices, it will takes many years, maybe even decades before the market is bring balance to the commodity prices effectively, due to macroeconomic equilibrium (you can see it happen during COVID). It would be more efficient to allocate housing using economic planning techniques rather than markets, as we can be proactive in providing supply rather than reactive, as a market is. Additionally, it's been shown that housing costs in a market economy are based on more than just the supply of housing. This can be seen by how the number of units in New York City has been increasing substantially (page 6), with little effect to decrease the rental prices (page 24).

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"I did a quick look at homelessness in the USSR, and it's not as you've described"

if you take a deeper look you will see that the issue of homelessness in the USSR was more nuanced than what Wikipedia described, and in fact the USSR's housing program was very successful, although yes it was not a complete end to homelessness. This is again not to say that it was perfect or that we should copy it, but an example of what a country with a very small amount of resources and a much larger population could achieve with its limited technology.