[ And why everyone’s ignoring it]
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THE OBVIOUS ANSWER TO HOMELESSNESS  
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Jerusalem Demsas
December 12, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ And why everyone’s ignoring it _

, Danielle Del Plato

 

When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy
befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol?
What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they
have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make
rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those
of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about
personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that
couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize
toward those who experience it.

But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for
America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices
play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in
California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in
New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between
structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this
issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs
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begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The
next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next
few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large,
confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.

You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the
individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario,
chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is
without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them.

Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who
specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual
vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or
divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing,
it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become
homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In
real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s
the underlying cause of homelessness.

In their book, _Homelessness Is a Housing Problem_
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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,
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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.

I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become
homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless
exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create
new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the
claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the
fundamental _causes_ of homelessness falls apart upon investigation.
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.)

America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and
unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has
always been warmer than Duluth—and yet the homelessness crisis we
see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s
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What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it’s
simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good
jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic
growth.

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
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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
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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.

Academics who study homelessness know this. So do policy wonks and
advocacy groups. So do many elected officials. And polling shows that
the general public recognizes that housing affordability plays a role
in homelessness. Yet politicians and policy makers have generally
failed to address the root cause of the crisis.

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
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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
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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
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This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the
historian Jacob Anbinder has explained
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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
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Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the
left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to
subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk
residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years,
roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to
create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the
biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn’t want
affordable housing in their communities.

Los Angeles isn’t alone. The Bay Area is notorious in this regard.
In the spring of 2020, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc
Andreessen published an essay
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Build,” that excoriated policy makers’ deference to “the old,
the entrenched.” Yet it turned out that Andreessen and his wife had
vigorously opposed
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building of a small number of multifamily units in the wealthy Bay
Area town of Atherton, where they live.

The small-_c_ conservative belief that people who already live in a
community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its
way into liberal ideology
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This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who
seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take
serious action to address it.

The worst harms of the homelessness crisis fall on the people who
find themselves without housing. But it’s not their suffering that
risks becoming a major political problem for liberal politicians in
blue areas: If you trawl through Facebook comments, Nextdoor posts,
and tweets, or just talk with people who live in cities with large
unsheltered populations, you see that homelessness tends to be viewed
as a problem of disorder, of public safety, of quality of life. And
voters are losing patience with their Democratic elected officials
over it.

In a 2021 poll
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in Los Angeles County, 94 percent of respondents said homelessness was
a serious or very serious problem. (To put that near unanimity into
perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic
congestion—in Los Angeles!) When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to
10, how unsafe “having homeless individuals in your neighborhood
makes you feel,” 37 percent of people responded with a rating of 8
or higher, and another 19 percent gave a rating of 6 or 7. In
Seattle, 71 percent of respondents to a recent poll
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they wouldn’t feel safe visiting downtown Seattle at night, and 91
percent said that downtown won’t recover until homelessness and
public safety are addressed. There are _a lot_ of polls like this.

As the situation has deteriorated, particularly in areas where
homelessness overruns public parks or public transit, policy makers’
failure to respond to the crisis has transformed what could have been
an opportunity for reducing homelessness into yet another cycle of
support for criminalizing it. In Austin, Texas, 57 percent of
voters backed reinstating criminal penalties
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homeless encampments; in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of
respondents to a _Washington Post _poll
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they supported shutting down “homeless tent encampments” even
without firm assurances that those displaced would have somewhere to
go. Poll data from Portland
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and Los Angeles
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other places, reveal similarly punitive sentiments.

This voter exasperation spells trouble for politicians who take
reducing homelessness seriously. Voters will tolerate disorder for
only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and
measures, even in very progressive areas. In places with large
unsheltered populations, numerous candidates have materialized to run
against mainstream Democrats on platforms of solving the homelessness
crisis and restoring public order.

By and large, the candidates challenging the failed Democratic
governance of high-homelessness regions are not proposing policies
that would substantially increase the production of affordable housing
or provide rental assistance to those at the bottom end of the market.
Instead, these candidates—both Republicans and law-and-order-focused
Democrats—are concentrating on draconian treatment of people
experiencing homelessness. Even in Oakland, California, a famously
progressive city, one of the 2022 candidates for mayor premised his
campaign entirely on eradicating homeless encampments and returning
order to the streets—and managed to finish third in a large field.

During the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race, neither the traditional
Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, who won, nor her opponent, Rick
Caruso, were willing to challenge the antidemocratic processes that
have allowed small groups of people to block desperately needed
housing. Caruso campaigned in part on empowering homeowners and
honoring “their preferences more fully,” as Ezra Klein put it
in _The New York Times_
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if I can translate, means allowing residents to block new housing more
easily. (After her victory, Bass nodded at the need
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house more people in wealthier neighborhoods—a tepid commitment that
reveals NIMBYism’s continuing hold
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liberal politicians.)

“We’ve been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years,
and it’s likely going to take us 40 years to get out,” Eric Tars,
the legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told me.

Building the amount of affordable housing necessary to stanch the
daily flow of new people becoming homeless is not the project of a
single election cycle, or even several. What can be done in the
meantime is a hard question, and one that will require investment in
temporary housing. Better models for homeless shelters arose out of
necessity during the pandemic. Using hotel space as shelter allowed
the unhoused to have their own rooms; this meant families could
usually stay together (many shelters are gender-segregated, ban pets,
and lack privacy). Houston’s success in combatting homelessness
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62 percent
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2011—suggests that a focus on moving people into permanent
supportive housing provides a road map to success. (Houston is less
encumbered
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the sorts of regulations that make building housing so difficult
elsewhere.)

The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the
homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear.
But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political
revolt—especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and
upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of
homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will
lead to humane policy change.

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
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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
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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.

_Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic._

* Homelessness in America
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* Housing Crisis
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* afforable housing
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* NIMBY
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