>Generations that never had access to affordable housing (like boomers had)
Today's tsunami of older homeless are the part of their generation that never had access to affordable housing, and are the tip of the iceberg.
Part of the reason is not the actual cost of housing which was already exorbitant by the 1970's, but more devastating was the dramatic reduction in the value of the currency that people had to work for over their lifetime since then.
60-year old "boomers" were not even near working age in 1970 so it was already too late for them to ever earn enough to build any long-term assets before the currency was destroyed.
50-year olds, sheesh.
Millions could never make the transition to a credit/debt environment where a lifetime of wages (in actual dollars more than the previous generation) was unable to build very significant lifetime assets at all compared to the appreciation on real estate by those who had the early opportunity for home ownership.
Those who did well with property ownership over the decades are much better off, but like I said the cost to get in back then was already exorbitant, and (naturally with well-structured debt) it cost a working person more than they actually earned over most of their working lifetime just to participate. So the only thing they had to show for a lifetime of work was their home, rather than money in the bank. They were screwed too, just not as bad, and as a result some of them are becoming homeless now anyway.
It's not some new thing where young people can see that now there may never be a chance to own a home no matter how hard or long they work for a living.
By the mid-1970's it was plain to see this was already the case, and what we see today would be the future result if the 20th century ever got here.
The baby boomers were not yet in power back then, many of those who were in the positions of financial manipulation at the time were actually born back in the 19th century. Post-Civil-War baby boomers I guess you would call the generation that set all this up.
Today's older survivors have always suffered for decades from the extraction that inflation leverages, very much like what young people who can do the math are seeing now that inflation is being imposed again.
The only real remedy ever is for prices to return to pre-inflation levels, but experience has shown that's never going to happen, which would be a lot to ask. If not a full return to "normalcy" then at least some reduction in prices, that hasn't happened either but it's the only hope so many have had for so many decades. It's too late now but it always has been.