I'm a couple chapters into Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, and I'm about halfway through the film The Brutalist.
Ignoring almost all content of both and zeroing in on one particular crossover: In one scene of the film, we find our character waking up in a huge room with like 30 beds. The morning bell goes off, everyone wakes up, showers, clothes, and heads off to work as laborers in the city, Philadelphia. Klein et al describe housing arrangements like "rooming houses" that rent out single rooms to individuals who share a kitchen and bathroom, etc.
Klein et al's thesis has many components, but one standing out to me at present is that there is today no gradient. In today's world, you are either homeless (in a tent on the street, or in a charitable place for night, etc.), or at a relative's or friends house, or ... you have your own apartment. Many locales do not have even any studio apartments, so you have a 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen and bathroom. This can go up of course to 2 bedroom apartment, houses, etc. The lack of studio apartments is one thing. The total absence of the "rent a bedroom and share amenities" arrangement is another. The film's arrangement of "share the bedroom and the amenities" is unheard of, besides of when I volunteered before for a religiously affiliated winter housing program for the homeless, which would rotate around churches and university gyms, using big open spaces filled with cots.
The thing is the gap. The "share everything" model certainly isn't desirable, and would draw only the poorest, and might be unpleasant to have come to your neighborhood, but if you don't have that, then those potential residents become just plain homeless. They cannot afford any of the better arrangements, that's why they're in the market for it!
The implications of this gap are huge. Not only does it affect the long-term poor, but also the transitional poor, those down on their luck, those who try to start a business and fail, those who leave their parents' home to start a career and want to save more aggressively to buy a home or self-fund a business. Imagine the second-chances and productive capitalist risk-taking we are missing out on because people who are just barely able to afford the 1 bedroom apartment consider striking it out for a better business but fear, "Man, if I fuck this up then I'm straight homeless" rather than, "Man, if I fail, then I'll take my last $100 bucks to set up at the rooming house and get that job at the grocery back. Worth the risk!"
We want to have an option at every price point so that people can slide up and down it according to ability, circumstances, and preference.
What other economic areas have this phenomenon of a gap that should be filled? A working smartphone can be had for every price-point, including nominally zero. Same with a laptop. Information (e.g. for education) is free, and there are a few gradients from community college, to public colleges, to private colleges, and maybe some of the lower gaps are offered by various certifications and technical schools. Maybe there's room for something less than technical school but more than a web sticker saying you've completed a course online. Food is granular, from a 5lb bag of rice to whatever you want. Healthcare is complicated... and gaps certainly exist both on the low end and surprisingly on the high end (it is not obvious to me, despite some light looking, how I would say, "Look, I'll pay $1,000 cash to be tested for as many of the most likely pre-symptomatic health issues I could hypothetically have." My last PCP refused to even take a blood panel on the basis that I am apparently healthy and he told me the risk of infection from the needle was greater than the likelihood of utility of the tests, which is such a wild claim I don't even know how to refute it.)
More to contemplate here.