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Notes -
Drug addicts mostly don't move anywhere. I've never seen any evidence that bears out the idea that there's a significant mobile homeless population migrating towards the most accommodating locales. As near as I can tell, it's the opposite: homeless addicts (and homeless generally) are overwhelmingly in the locality where they became homeless, and where they aren't they're usually near-ish.
True.
There are approximate 1,500,000 new housing starts in the US per year. If we take your estimated cost per unit of 350k (tbh I think this is high, but this is all ROM so it's not going to radically change the picture), we're already spending ~$525b/year. $5T over ten years. Hitting the 20% you suggested entails doubling that. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of money, but an extra $5T over years for a country with the wealth of the US is not some inconceivable sum. Especially considering that most of it would be coming from the private sector rather than the government. (I also note that it is probably overkill - housing shortages are highly concentrated. WV doesn't need to increase its housing stock at all, CA needs to increase it a lot)
I'd also note that marginal shifts do matter. If the average rent goes down by $200, that suggests low end rent is also going down. It may not be a radical, sweeping improvement, but there will be people who can afford housing who couldn't before or who move from precarious to... less precarious. If building housing is unworkable than that is in effect saying the problem is unsolvable. Solving the opioid crisis is a worthy political goal, but it won't do much for homelessness.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm
Even if it's equalized in the intervening time, it doesn't alter the underlying point that the relationship between drug ODs and homelessness rates are not strongly correlated. A hypothetical scenario where WA and WV have the same OD rate but WA has four times the homelessness rate does not suggest drugs are driving homelessness. On the other hand, the median home price in Charleston is $150k, in Seattle it's $800k.
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