Don’t take government money to do something good, thereby avoiding the government’s strings necessarily attached (as well as government’s strings that are attached unnecessarily), and be able to do the good thing at much less cost, including for the taxpayers providing the government’s fettered money.

By forgoing government assistance and the many regulations and requirements that come with it, SDS Capital Group said the [affordable housing] 49-unit apartment building it is financing in South Los Angeles will cost about $291,000 a unit to build.
The roughly 4,500 apartments for low-income people that have been built with funding from a $1.2 billion bond measure LA voters approved in 2016 have cost an average of $600,000 each.

It’s even worse in San Jose:

A recent report commissioned by the city of San Jose found affordable-housing projects that received tax credits cost an average of around $939,000 a unit to build there last year.

There are some naysayers:

Some affordable-housing veterans worry whether privately funded construction can scale quickly enough to match the scope of the homelessness problem and whether its backers will maintain their commitments to serve the needy.

That’s a problem for government to solve, not the private funders of affordable housing. It’s government regulations, both well-intended and done solely for political gain, and government strings dictating how government-provided funds must be spent that impact the scope of the “homeless problem.” Government regulations and strings create, in large part, the homeless numbers, including especially the duration of individual and individual family homelessness.

Another case of the advantage of letting a free market operate freely. Imagine that.