On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced “the most comprehensive street homeless outreach effort ever deployed in an American city.” The city estimates there are between three and four thousand people living on the street. The program will be called “HOME-STAT,” a reference to the NYPD’s COMPSTAT program.

So you want to live in New York City.

More than 181,000 people applied for 14 affordable apartments in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Time to start tweaking the master plan.

The city of Boston could be “stuck in an endless housing crunch” for years to come with constantly rising housing costs. Oh, you can’t afford to live in Boston? Blessing in disguise. Is this story a joke?

The New York Times reports that Wall Street investment firm and national landlord The Blackstone Group is about to buy Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village—at 11,232 units across 110 buildings, the largest apartment complex in Manhattan—for around $5.4 billion.

A new report says America’s affordable housing crisis will soon grow worse, with an 11% rise in households spending more than half their income on rent over the next decade. So: any bright ideas?

New York City, a crowded land sorely in need of housing, is in the midst of its “biggest building boom in a generation,” issuing new residential building permits at a pace not seen for more than 50 years. Soon there could be tens of thousands of new apartments that you can’t afford.

“Millennials,” a demographic group defined by a slavish devotion to “keeping it real” by purchasing the correct consumer products, are now old enough to be “out there” in the world, “doing their thing.” Instead, they are living at home.

Across America, rents are higher than ever, and they show no sign of slowing their climb. With housing shortages everywhere, owning a home seems like an impossible dream. Or is it?

“People who are living in lower-income housing are not necessarily people who are committing crimes.” Ah, okay, thank you for clarifying.

Because there is nowhere to live, the Clinton campaign asked the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce to help its young staffers out. “The chamber suggested Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights, but has not made much progress in convincing staffers to consider these less gentrified neighborhoods.”

New research from the ACLU is shedding light on just how badly black Americans were economically damaged by the Great Recession of 2008. The racial differences in loss are extremely stark.

The past decade has seen New York City go from a city with an economically mixed landscape to a city in which the rich have burst forth into every last neighborhood. Except three.

In many cities around the world—New York, San Francisco, London—most people find the rent to be unaffordable. Buying is out of the question. Perhaps that is because your city’s housing stock is now just another fungible financial instrument, like pork bellies.

When it was announced last July that NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development approved a high-rise building with separate entrances for low-income and wealthy tenants, outrage dutifully followed. But now that applications for the building are open, the city’s housing problem appears to be worse than we thought.

Just when you think living in New York can't get any dumber, the New York Times' Real Estate section arrives. This Sunday New Yorkers were treated to a story on married couples who've taken roommates into their already too-small apartments. Because money's already tight and you can't afford a place just for the two of you, how much worse could it get sharing a fridge with 22-year-old Tyler?

"Gentrification tends to stop when affluent people stop wanting to move into the city," Megan McArdle says in a fine overview of the intractability of the affordable housing problem. The only real solution, it would seem, is to close the gap between the affluent and everyone else.

San Francisco is opening a forward-thinking new homeless shelter designed to house entire communities of people who have long lived on the streets. If you would like to be pessimistic about this nice development, consider the big picture.

In California, the high cost of housing is hurting the state's economic growth and pushing its citizens deeper into poverty. But there's so much land! Why is it so hard to find somewhere affordable to rent?

Brooklyn, which used to be the part of New York City that "real people" could afford to live in, is now the least affordable housing market in America. It won't be too long now before people start getting upset about that.