Trying to understand what seems to be a very subtle difference in written and spoken English. Recently, I've seen articles that use 'to + gerund' and 'to + infinitive' in the exact same situations, especially when preceded by an independent clause with a subjective complement:
Editor's Corner: There is no silver bullet to solve homelessness
'There is no silver bullet' to solving N.D.'s worker shortage, officials say
These exist in relatively equal distribution on google, (16k for 'no silver bullet to solve' and 13k for 'no silver bullet to solving), and I'm having a tough time understanding syntactically what might be going on here.
I thought a good analogy might be the "I look forward to hear/hearing from you" mistake than many English language learners make, but this doesn't seem to be that same situation, both in the sense that to my native ears one doesn't sound much better than the other, and I'm not sure they're the same syntactically.
In my (probably misguided) syntactic reading of the first sentence ('There is no silver bullet to solve homelessness'), I think that 'to solve homelessness' is an infinitive clause acting as a prepositional phrase:
And therefore is syntactically similar to something like, "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's." This, to me, seems correct. Does this seem on base? And if so, why do these two different approaches exist equally on the net? Is there any potential syntactic reading for 'to solving' that makes sense here?