Jon expands on the point here.
As I said, I'm a good liberal who is happy to do whatever is politically possible to make the lives of local poor people easier. For some reason I don't quite get, providing subsidized affordable housing is usually more popular than most poverty relief programs. If that's the best we can do, so be it. But real estate really is cheap here. There's a full range of housing stock variety, unit size, and neighborhood quality. Land really is close to free in parts of the city.
Poverty is a problem, lack of cheap housing isn't.
