You may not be aware, but liberalism is a bit of an overloaded term. Some folks use it to mean liberal in the sense of 'permissive', while others use it in the more traditional political sense of 'permissive free market capitalist'.
The US has plenty of the latter (and, in fact, just elected one President). I believe that there's a difference between 'Leftists' and 'Liberals' in the Democrat side of US politics, where the Leftists argue for social democracy and the Liberals argue for unity and a return to civility, coupled with a moderately regulated market economy.
I tried, and apparently failed, to allude to this in my original post. The implication I tried to make is that in housing Americans should return to classical liberalism: the owner of a property has the right to do whatever they please with it, barring any activities that would impede on others general rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Building dense housing in cities with crises of housing affordability and homelessness does not impede on said liberties, in fact we could reasonably proclaim that laws forcing an oligopoly of land and home owners does infringe on the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by making the human right to housing unattainable by significant percentages of the population. Therefore, we should consider the elimination of that regulation because it inevitably serves to restrict the supply of housing, policies such as zoning, inequitable taxation on land ownership, and selective rent freezing. These regulations are at odds with the liberties our government serves to guarantee.
A simple and fair solution to the housing crisis is to make the housing markets fair, by treating all renters and homeowners the same, and by restricting their behavior only to the most minimal degree that is necessary to protect their life and liberty. Policies that engender the enrichment of the ownership class and the perpetual underclass at the expense of all others, squeeze the middle class into one or the other category, and mostly to the inferior one.
Your market solutions is already known to be for the enrichment of the ownership class. That's the whole point of capitalism - enrich people who own stuff.
There's inherent unfairness between the renter and owner; letting the owner kick the renter to the curb on the drop of a hat isn't going to make things better
My point is, with San Francisco as an example, we don't even have the pretense of a market solution, due to cofactors such as California's 1978 Prop 13 and aggressive rent freezes for so-called "original" tenants. These two policies are examples of the state creating two favored classes at the expense of all other citizens.
The US has plenty of the latter (and, in fact, just elected one President). I believe that there's a difference between 'Leftists' and 'Liberals' in the Democrat side of US politics, where the Leftists argue for social democracy and the Liberals argue for unity and a return to civility, coupled with a moderately regulated market economy.
Some additional reading on the topic: https://theconversation.com/the-difference-between-left-and-...