> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

Aren't half of these wrong?

NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.

You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.

Shelter should be, but doesn't need to be housing. When people fear that public transportation becomes shelter they're not arguing houses will be built in train stations.

Having other places with a roof, some security and some public amenities should go a long way to avoid other services getting bogged down by homelessness.

Why shouldn't we have exactly the ambitions you're using as an argument against change? I support all of those proposals. The richest nation in history could do all of that easily if there was the will to do so.

If giving away free public services could be grifted to increase the bottom line of the ultra wealthy, we'd have a utopian society.

I absolutely despise the world we live in where the default answer to everything is effectively “no.”

I wish we could get to a point where we default to “yes” and find solutions rather than making it easier to say “no.”