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Posted Dec 12, 2022, 11:43 PM
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Peddling to progress
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Join Date: Jul 2019
Location: Vancouver's West End
Posts: 1,631
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THE OBVIOUS ANSWER TO HOMELESSNESS
And why everyone’s ignoring it
Quote:
In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.
Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.”
Why is this so? Because these “superstar cities,” as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machine—and they all need homes to live in. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructure—housing—necessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.
It’s not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway.
If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.
With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but it’s not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East Coast and the Midwest have a lot more shelter capacity than the West Coast, which keeps homeless people more out of view.)
Homelessness is best understood as a “flow” problem, not a “stock” problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homeless—the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county—but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.
The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even “low income” housing is still very expensive. A study led by an economist at Zillow shows that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent, homelessness spikes.
Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction—in 2022, just 17 percent of homeless people reported that they’d lived in San Francisco for less than one year, according to city officials. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundant other research indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness. Consider, too, that some people move to superstar cities in search of gainful employment and then find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of living—not a phenomenon that can be blamed on welfare policies.
But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.
Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.
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“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of riding a bike” – John F Kennedy
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