Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at Lucien’s argument. He tells us that public-housing advocates claim that the many homeless people are proof that there’s insufficient housing available to them, and so that we need more low-income apartments. But, concludes Lucien, this is absurd (oh, Lucien…). Lucien thinks this because he has a bunch of apartments in his own building that are unrented, as well as his professional colleagues. So there are “available” apartments, so homelessness is just because people are unable or unwilling to pay the rent.
So what’s the flaw in Lucien’s argument here? Is it that it fails to address the issue, raised by the public-housing advocates’ argument, of who would pay for the construction of more low-income housing? First of all, is this something that they actually raise? No, nothing like that is said in the stimulus, they don’t actually raise the issue of who’s paying. So since that’s not even raised, (E) definitely can’t be a flaw. But let’s say it was raised; would Lucien’s not responding be a flaw? Remember, Lucien’s claim is just that homelessness is caused by people’s inability or unwillingness to work to pay the rent. So the idea of who pays for low-income housing is pretty irrelevant to what Lucien is arguing, and so there’s no real need for him to respond to it. So even if it had been raised, it wouldn’t really be a flaw for Lucien to not respond to it, even though his argument is bad in other ways. For those reasons, (E) is not the main flaw here.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
