How the affordable housing crisis drives homelessness
How the affordable housing crisis drives homelessness
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have come to an agreement in principle on the debt limit.
The current deal holds non-defense discretionary spending about flat and looks to curb federal budget growth for the next couple years. But if we want to really tackle big issues like the affordable housing crisis and homelessness we actually need a lot more money.
A new Marketplace special “Finding Your Place: New thinking for people with nowhere to live,” explores how debt ceiling talks are further stalling progress on big priorities like the housing crisis.
Marketplace’s David Brancaccio sat down with Gregg Colburn, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments and co-author, along with Clayton Page Aldern, of the book “Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns.”
The following is an edited version of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: Let me go through a couple of possibilities for how many people explain what’s happening with homelessness in America now. Substance abuse is that the dominant driver?
Gregg Colburn: There are probably three dominant narratives, I would say substance use is right at the top of the list. Poverty and mental illness are probably the other two. There’s clear evidence that those factors and attributes increase the risk of experiencing homelessness at the individual level. But what we demonstrate in the book is that is not why our coastal cities have really, really high rates of homelessness. It’s not that we have more drug users or people who are experiencing mental illness, there are other structural factors at play.
David Brancaccio: And you’ve gone through the data. You’ve gone through the data across the country. And what then would explain it?
Colburn: Well, what we argue in the book is that access to housing, access to affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness. And in places like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Washington D.C., access to housing is very, very limited – even with people with good incomes. And what happens then is when housing is scarce, it’s not available, and it’s very expensive, if you’re vulnerable in any way – you’re poor, you’ve been discriminated against because of your race or ethnicity, you’re physically disabled, you’re mentally ill – you’re far more likely to experience homelessness. And what we demonstrate in the book is that the reason Seattle has five times the per capita rate of homelessness of Chicago is not because we have more people with vulnerabilities, it’s because our housing is really expensive, and it’s scarce. And for people with low incomes, that has really dire consequences.
David Brancaccio: Yeah because we’re talking about housing access, let’s just be clear, you’re talking about numbers of possible dwellings, but you’re also very much talking about supply and demand. You’re talking about how much it costs to find adequate housing.
Colburn: That’s exactly right. And one of the more interesting stories that we tell in the book is Detroit, Michigan, which is the most impoverished city in the United States, has far lower rates of homelessness than very affluent communities like Seattle and San Francisco. And the reason for that is, is that housing is relatively affordable in Detroit as compared to other places. And so even though there are people with very low incomes in that community, they’re able to find housing. And that’s not the case, unfortunately, in many of our coastal cities.
Housing at scale
David Brancaccio: Now, some cities have been very focused on this and made some policy changes years gone by that have helped their homelessness problem here in 2023. I’m thinking of, for instance, Milwaukee, but also Houston, Texas.
Colburn: Absolutely, both Houston and Milwaukee have done really good work. And they have used an intervention called “housing first,” which was developed by Sam Tsemberis in New York, probably 20 years ago now, 25 years ago. And the idea of housing first is for people who have acute behavioral health crises, it’s important to get them stable, and then we can start to work on the other issues that they have in their lives. And what Milwaukee and Houston did was they scaled that intervention and made real good inroads on the problem of homelessness. Now, when the New York Times wrote about this program in Houston, I got a lot of phone calls and said, ‘Gregg, why aren’t we doing this in Seattle?’ And the answer is we are, we are using housing first. One of the challenges we have as it’s really hard to scale that intervention in Seattle, because we just don’t have available units in which to place people. And so this housing market scarcity not only produces homelessness, but it also makes it harder for us to use the interventions that we know work well.
Brancaccio: Why the scarcity in a place like Seattle, because there’s just not building fast enough?
Colburn: We’re not building fast enough. As we argue in the book, you know, the perfect storm for a housing crisis is a lot of people moving to a community, which creates demand for housing. And think of our coastal boom towns, where we you see lots of employment growth and people wanting to move there for economic opportunity. And if you combine that with to use an economic term, really inelastic housing supply. So San Francisco is one of the hardest places to build in the United States. It has challenging regulatory environment and you have challenging topography, mountains and water. And so as more and more people moved to that community, they have not built sufficient housing. And so when you got a lot of demand for housing and insufficient supply, what happens? Prices go up and vacancy rates go down and that really squeezes people who are low income. As opposed to southern boom towns, which have actually grown their housing supply pretty significantly, places like Charlotte and Phoenix have grown almost as fast as Seattle. But they’ve been able to accommodate that growth with higher housing production. Now, many times they’ve done that through sprawl and maybe other means that some people might not find real attractive, but they have been able to accommodate that growth by building more housing. And so I think that’s a lesson for our coastal cities is, we need to make sure when we have a population boom, that that population boom is accompanied with robust housing production. And that hasn’t happened, unfortunately.
“A healthy community requires people doing a variety of different jobs. It can’t only be investment bankers and tech titans living in these cities…”
Brancaccio: So I mean, you’ve been confronting this data for a while now. I mean, where are you left in terms of the areas that are most ripe for making policy changes that would help this. Is it making it easier to build, relaxing zoning rules and other rules like that?
Colburn: I would say if we think about this from a public policy standpoint, there’s a couple of levers that we could pull. One is certainly a regulatory lever, which is we need to think about our land use. And in many of our cities, we have to confront the fact that we’ve had relatively exclusionary land use in the sense that we’ve only allowed single family housing many of the residential parcels in our cities, and that’s going to have to change. Our cities are going to have to be denser, we’re going to need to go up, we’re going to have to have more people living on each parcel in order to accommodate all the people who are in these cities. That is certainly a necessary condition, but it’s not sufficient to deal with the problem of homelessness. We also have to confront the fact that there’s a significant segment of the population who will not be able to afford market rate housing. As a society to date, we’ve kind of said, “Well, that’s tough, we’re gonna let the market figure this out,” because we have such a small program that provides housing to low-income households. And so we need to confront at the federal, state and local level, how are we going to ensure that there’s housing that people can access and either that is giving people subsidies, or it is subsidizing housing that’s affordable for people with lower incomes. And the scary thing about that is that’s an expensive endeavor, because housing is expensive to construct and it costs a lot every month. And so that’s a reckoning that we as a nation are going to confront. And to date, we haven’t done a very good job of that.
Brancaccio: And you didn’t just say state and local, you also said federal. Lots of work to be done there.
Colburn: Yeah, the federal government has really taken a step back from housing assistance over the last 40 years since we abandoned construction of public housing. We have a voucher program that has demonstrated good success for low-income households. But unfortunately, only one in five people who are eligible for federal housing support actually get it. So unlike food support, food stamps, or what’s now called SNAP, if you’re eligible, you get it. With housing, four out of five people don’t get it, and so then they are going to their state county local jurisdiction saying “I need help, I can’t afford my housing.” And that’s a really expensive line item and the household budget and a huge burden on local governments. And so it would help immensely if we got more action from the federal government. And unfortunately, it looks like well, on a lot of things, we may not get a lot of action on a D.C. unfortunately, on that front.
Brancaccio: I was very struck, you must have seen this, an economist at Zillow, the real estate side, showed that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30% or more of their income on rent, homelessness goes up where that happens.
Colburn: Absolutely. And we cite that study in our book, it’s great work. And it just demonstrates that these economic forces are powerful. And it’s … as I always say, it’s hard for third grade teachers to find places to live in Seattle as a result of our boom in our housing crisis. And the consequences for people who aren’t third grade teachers, who are working at a $15 minimum wage are significant. And there’s a big chunk of our homeless population in Seattle that are employed, people don’t realize that. They’re earning $15 an hour, they’re likely living in their cars, or vans or in a tent somewhere, they’re showering at the YMCA and then heading to work. And so the reality is that these booming coastal cities have to figure out how are we going to accommodate people of all income levels, because a healthy community requires people doing a variety of different jobs. It can’t only be investment bankers and tech titans living in these cities, otherwise we will crumble as a society in my opinion.
No, weather doesn’t cause homelessness
Brancaccio: So you must roll your eyes when someone inevitably tells you “Well, the reason the coastal cities, especially out west, see so much homelessness as well, it’s the weather’s nicer. So that’s where people move.” It’s not what your data really shows.
Colburn: No, I joke in my public talks that if you leave my talk with one thing, please, please, please don’t repeat the narrative that weather causes homelessness. Boston is very cold in the wintertime and they’ve got lots of homelessness, as does New York. And there are other warm-weather cities that don’t have problems with homelessness. And so there are structural factors here and one of them is not Mother Nature.
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