Sure, but that's not what you espoused. You mentioned it as the best opinionated middle ground, but ultimately concluded, too much regulation was bad--Georgism involves far more regulation than we currently have. Note that Georgism isn't just about land.

> Making the regulations easier to navigate does not make it anarcho-capitalism.

Sure, but "making regulations easier to navigate" is quite a bit different from listing every current regulation you can think of and saying they are the cause of our current problems.

Even if we charitably assume you're genuinely proposing Georgism as the end goal, that's a complicated ideology to implement. What are the steps to get there? It seems like your only concrete solution is to get rid of the too-much-regulation examples you mentioned--the few weak protections we have--and vaguely "implement Georgism". Whether you intend it as such or not, that's a motte-and-bailey fallacy: the end result of this plan is simply to get rid of regulation and then fail to implement Georgism.

I don't share your optimism that land value tax cannot simply be passed on to renters. Closing that massive loophole involves implementing the rest of Georgism, which I'm not convinced you know exists since you've failed to mention it entirely. And ultimately, I am not convinced that loophole is possible to close.

And then there's the separate problem of accurately valuing land in order to tax it.

> The US housing crisis is an urban problem.

No, it's not. Homeless flock to urban areas because it's easier to survive without a home in an urban area, and small-town/suburban cops have a lot more ability to just imprison all the homeless they encounter under some pretext. But a lack of affordable housing in suburban and rural areas is absolutely a cause of homelessness just as much as a lack of housing in urban areas is. If anything, the lack of employment opportunities in suburban/rural areas creates more housing insecurity.

> In the above examples, housing of those who have it, is being protected by the laws as if it is a need.

Is it? I don't think so, and you conveniently talked around zoning laws which are more obviously treating housing as an investment and not a basic need.

These laws presuppose that housing as an investment is a reasonable thing. I suppose that assumption doesn't mutually exclude housing as a basic need, but the laws you mention completely lack the sorts of protections with real effect that regulate investors in other basic needs. If your water company or electric company fail to provide service, they get fined--who gets fined for failing to provide housing? When food supplies became insecure, we subsidized farming at a level that creates a permanent excess of food: who are we subsidizing to create a permanent excess of housing?

> If you have a better solution, then I'm all ears.

Well, housing is a basic need. You keep dropping phrasing like "if housing is a basic need" or "as if it is a basic need", but the statement "Housing is a basic human need" surely is not under debate? So maybe we treat things the way they are. There's no need for an "opinionated middle ground"--there are not two sides to this coin: housing is a basic need. I do not care about investors in housing: people withholding people's basic needs to collect rent are a blight and should be treated as such.

No one should be able to own houses they do not live in. I have no objection to simply giving landlords a year to sell off their rental properties, but realistically this sort of regulation is hard enough to pass without cutting the oligarchy out of their pound of flesh, so some sort of compromise that reimburses landlords somewhat is a reasonable compromise if we can solve homelessness permanently.