Is it merely a lack of joined up thinking or is it simply a rank bad system?

USA 771K homeless, 15M empty homes That's 20 empty homes for every homeless person.
UK 380K homeless, >1M empty homes, 540K of them in England. That's around 3 empty homes for every homeless person.
NL 33K homeless, >200K empty homes That's around 6 empty homes for every homeless person

It seems that the problem is larger in some countries, smaller in others. The 3 countries I looked at all have way more empty homes than they do homeless people.

The strange thing over here is that whist having 200K empty homes and "only" 33K homeless, those in the know from Governemnt down all say we have a shortage of 400K homes. How does that work? Add the 400K they say they want to build to the 200K empty dwellings, subtract the 33K homeless who could be given a home, there's 570K empty houses left over... I realise there's issues like affordability and location which would account for some of the "redundancy" but 570K? Seems ridiculous. I have no doubt that a stats check in the UK and USA would show a similar sort of discrepancy. Affordability and location.

Surely, somebody can come up with a viable solution.