> A locality mandating housing is one example: if they go for the bare and cheapest minimum to fullfil an obligation for a specified number of houses, allowing for basement closets will result in more basement closets, without anyone being less homeless than they were before.
The root problem here is that you're trying to mandate housing rather than adopting policies that allow market rate housing to be affordable. When there is demand for housing and no law prohibiting it, people build housing. You shouldn't have to mandate it unless you're already screwing it up to begin with.
But even if you were to mandate some specific construction, you could set minimum requirements for that without prohibiting someone else who is under no obligation to build anything from building something inexpensive without those requirements.
> An employer providing rooms for employees is another.
Which doesn't even happen in urban environments unless it's some kind of tax dodge and then it's being supplied to affluent employees who aren't going to live in a closet.
Can you name a single company that actually does this for low wage employees in e.g. New York City?
> I see it the same way as minimum wages. Putting the bar too high is penalizing for everyone, but lowering it to the ground only breeds a hellscape.
I see it the same way as minimum wages. A worthless policy that doesn't even solve the problem it's supposed to solve, often makes it worse, and would have no purpose or effect in the event that we solved it properly.
It's also not really even that debatable that we've set the bar too high for housing. Never mind requirements for windows, we have requirements for parking and, in many areas lawns that consume the majority of the lot which in itself can only have a building of a low maximum height.
> But it's only a potential.
It's not a hypothetical, it's a thing that happens in particular circumstances -- namely the undersupply of housing. If you can fix that then it wouldn't happen but you wouldn't need it to.
> And the other side is not hypothetical, it's what we had before the regulations, and it was bad enough that people agreed to put rules in place.
People put the rules in place to price the "undesirables" out of the area, not to help them out.
If you were trying to help them out you wouldn't prohibit the only housing they can afford, you would adopt policies that result in the creation of lots of new housing that causes the market price of a quality unit with lots of natural light to fall to the price they can afford.