It wasn't an ad hominem. I meant what I said literally. I respect you as a human being, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.

Do you want an explanation of why I believe you don't know what you're talking about? Okay, fine.

Define viable.

Let's go with "within financial means without incurring significant non-financial hardship".

You mean a dwelling place that protects you from the elements well enough that they won't even be in the top 50 ways you'll be likely to die statistically?

This is a ridiculous definition, and it almost doesn't make sense to respond to the rest of your post as a result.

You want to start name-dropping debating fallacies? This one is called a "strawman"..

Homeless shelters take care of that and there are other options in between.

This might be wrong even under your absurd definition of a viable alternative to renting. In 2017, assault homicides were between the 20th and 7th most common way to die in the USA [0].

Violent assaults (although not necessarily resulting in death) are so common in NYC homeless shelters that the city restricted its definition of a "critical incident" in order to keep these numbers low [1].

There were 62,679 homeless people in shelters in January 2020 [2]. In 2017 and 2018, there were 675 critical incidents in homeless shelters; let's assume that's 337 a year, and let's assume that only 1/4 are violent crimes (the rest being drug and weapon possessions), meaning about 84 violent crimes in shelters a year. So that's 84 / 62,679 = around 0.13% violent crime rate in homeless shelters. The NYC population in January 2019 was around 8.3 million. There were 3,865 violent crimes in January 2019 [3]. So that was 3,865 / 8,300,000 = around 0.05% violent crime rate. So violent crimes, according to my back-of-the-envelope estimates, were 2.6 times more likely in homeless shelters than in the general population.

And if we expand beyond just "death" as the only negative outcome, it's a general fact that homeless shelters can be just as dangerous as living in the street, if not moreso [4] [5] [6].

But let's expand into my definition of viable. If you know anything about a homeless shelter or homelessness, you know that being homeless in general, and living in a shelter specifically, does incur several forms of significant non-financial hardships. So, no, homeless shelters are not a viable alternative to renting an apartment. And the only way you can argue otherwise is if you don't know what you're talking about.

As for businesses - I know plenty of multi-million dollar businesses that have no need for a brick and mortar, but the business angle isn't even an argument - there's never a need for anyone to create a business, there's only incentive and the incentive is high enough that people freely choose to pay rent for businesses that require a physical location.

I'm not talking about multi-million dollar businesses. So let me clarify.

Find me a deli, local drugstore, or local clothing store that doesn't need a storefront. The alternative is some kind of currently-nonexistent delivery-only society. Likewise, find me a wholesaler that doesn't need a warehouse. I don't even know how this would work. Maybe you can explain it to me; otherwise I have to conclude that you don't know what you're talking about.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_06-508.pdf
1: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/violence-redefined-nyc-...
2: https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...
3: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p0204a/nypd-citywide-cri...
4: https://www.westword.com/news/reasons-why-denvers-homeless-s...
5: https://thecity.nyc/2019/11/nyc-homeless-shelter-chaos-drive...
6: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/nyregion/homeless-shelter...