In this episode, hear an exclusive speech by author and professor Gregg Colburn with a bonus Q&A on the relationship between housing availability and homelessness, individual versus systemic causes, and how city leaders can approach solutions.
At a recent event held at Harvard University the author and professor Gregg Colburn spoke to chiefs of staff and deputy mayors of 30 large US cities, and we're releasing the audio of that speech with a bonus question and answer session. Listen to Colburn discuss the role of housing availability in homelessness, and explain how even when individual factors such as mental illness and substance abuse contribute to homelessness, the root cause is the lack of affordable housing. Colburn emphasizes the need for a structural solution to the housing crisis, as well as the importance of clear messaging and evidence-based interventions.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Betsy Gardner:
Hi, and welcome to the Data Smart City Pod. This is Betsy Gardner, senior editor at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and producer of this podcast. We have a really special episode for you today. First, a recording of a keynote speech given by professor and author Gregg Colburn, who spoke at our recent project on municipal innovation convening about his book, homelessness is a Housing Problem. This event brings together chiefs of staff and deputy mayors from 30 of the largest US cities, and we're excited to be able to share this moment from the convening. Next, you'll hear the q and a I conducted with Gregg after his talk. You will hear some background noise during his keynote speech, but we hope you enjoy this exclusive content. Thanks for listening.
Gregg Colburn:
Thank you so much for having me. It's a real privilege to be with you this evening. Thank you to the team, Betsy, Kaitlin, Steve, for inviting me. I really appreciate it. I am here to talk about a book that I wrote, and I'm going to just give you a little background on motivation for why I chose to write this book. I first got interested in this issue. I'm a second career academic. My first career was in finance. I was an investment banker and private equity investor for about 17 years, and my first job was in New York and it was 1995, and I was riding the subway from the Upper West side down to Wall Street where my office was. And there was this person who was mayor at the time, named Giuliani. You may have heard of him, and he was cleaning up Manhattan. And what I realized as I was taking the subway was what cleaning up Manhattan meant people would be sleeping on the subway.
I would be there in my ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit reading the Wall Street Journal, and police officers would come on the subway and rip people out of the subway who were sleeping. And I remember one man in particular in this look of fear on his face as someone woke him out of a deep sleep. And I kind of was thinking, I wonder where these people are going. And I realized after a couple of years in New York what cleaning up Manhattan meant, it meant making it better for tourists and people like me who lived and work in the city. And so I had this interest in housing as I went through my private sector career, and I was about to turn 40, and as my wife will say, I had a midlife crisis and I wanted to get a PhD and focus on housing. The reason I focus on housing, and there are all sorts of important pursuits from a research standpoint, education, healthcare, et cetera.
I really believe that housing it's fundamental to a healthy, productive human existence. And in the absence of housing, all these other outcomes we care about, healthcare, education, et cetera, are compromised. And so that's the reason why I chose to focus on housing. When I moved to Seattle in 2017 to start my work at the University of Washington, I quickly got involved in conversations around housing and homelessness and I would go to meetings and I would quickly realize that we as a community did not understand what was going on. If you read the Seattle Times or any of your newspapers, every day there's a different story with a different explanation of the homelessness crisis. And people understandably who are concerned citizens say, what the heck is going on? And we don't seem to have any handle on this. The problem continues to get worse. Obviously, what we're doing isn't working.
And as a researcher and someone who cares about empirical evidence, I was really frustrated by this because we've known in the academic literature for some time that there's a strong relationship between housing costs and access to housing and homelessness. Yet if you were to ask anyone on the street in Seattle and say, what causes homelessness? What would they say? Drugs and mental illness and poverty, and those are important factors, there's no doubt about it. So the purpose of this book that came out last year was really to, we break a little bit of ground from a research standpoint, but I would say that the book is more of a translational piece. And what I wanted to do was for someone who's walking around Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Boston, New York, DC, the big six cities for homelessness to explain why is the problem so bad in your community?
And if we can then focus our attention on the root cause of this crisis, we can stop playing whack-a-mole with different explanations and focus our time and energy into that one area. And in the absence of that, I fear, I fear, I fear that this problem will continue to get worse. So that was really the motivation here. So causation is something that if you have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to go get a PhD, you're going to think a lot about what causes a particular outcome. We teach all sorts of courses on causal inference. And so obviously if you're going to write a book about homelessness, we should ask what causes homelessness. And the problem with that is it's a complicated answer. We generate understandings through a variety of different mechanisms. One of the mechanisms that we ask people who are experiencing homelessness, why are you homeless as part of the point in time count, which happens in all of your jurisdictions every January?
It's when we create the estimate of the homeless population in the United States. We also conduct surveys and we'll say, James, why are you homeless? And people give very blunt answers, I drink too much. My boyfriend beat me up and I ran. I got in an argument with my roommate, he or she kicked me out and now I'm here. And so what happens is we then list these factors. The Seattle Times gets ahold of them and says, here are the causes of homelessness, and who am I to not honor these responses? All of these responses are legitimate and real, but I fundamentally don't believe that divorce is a cause of homelessness. If my wife and I, and I hope it doesn't happen, we're to get divorced tonight, neither of us would be homeless tomorrow. The context in which these things happen really, really matters. I've thought about changing the slide and just writing life over the top of it.
Life happens, and for some people in the wrong set of circumstances, these circumstances can lead to very, very terrible outcomes like homelessness. So what we do in the book is not to discount these, we honor these, but we try to draw a distinction between a root cause of homelessness and a precipitating event. Divorce, for example, would be a precipitating event that might produce homelessness. We would argue that housing costs and housing availability are the root cause. The way that we've tried to highlight the difference between a precipitating event and a root causes of this analogy of musical chairs that social scientists have used in a variety of different realms previously. But imagine the game. 10 friends, 10 chairs, leader starts the music, pulls one chair out, music stops, and everyone scrambles. In this case, Mike had an ankle injury and loses the game, was hobbling around on crutches.
So if we were, I'm a big sports fan, if ESPN were there and interviewing Mike after the game, say, Mike, why'd you lose the game? What would he say? I had a bad ankle. And everyone would nod. Mike had a bad ankle. Of course he lost the game. But if we really step back and say, why didn't Mike have a chair? Because we didn't have 10 chairs, this is exactly what's happening in our coastal cities right now. When there is scarcity and there's a fight or a vicious game for housing, who's going to win and who's going to lose? The Amazon People are going to win every time. For those of you who're track and field fans, I say it's like playing musical chairs with the Usain Bolt. If you know the Jamaican sprinter, fastest man in the world, he's going to win every time.
The Amazon folks are going to win every time. But yet when we see Joe on the street, we don't think about the fact that there are enough housing units. We say, of course Joe's homeless. He's addicted. Of course Joe's homeless. He's experiencing mental illness crisis. And so that's fundamentally the challenge here is that we end up focusing on these individual vulnerabilities and participating events rather than the root cause, which is we just don't have enough housing. And these individual factors, which are important, serve as a sorting mechanism. They identify the people who are most likely to lose their housing when it's scarce. Yet we spill ink in every city around the nation talking about these precipitating events and not the fundamental reason why Joe's on the street in the first place. So I don't want you to leave here and say, Gregg doesn't think drugs are a problem.
They are. That's not the point of the story, but people are using drugs and are mentally ill and poor and in every city in the United States, and that manifests itself as homelessness in some places and that other places it doesn't. That should cause us to say, well, why is that? So the fundamental question we ask in the book is we ask why does homelessness vary so widely throughout the United States rates of homelessness, these are per capita rates that I'm talking about. And the reason we ask that question is because if we can answer that properly, it should give us some information about where we should be focusing our time, energy, and resources. So Seattle, my home city on a per capita basis has five times the homelessness of Chicago. So that's a huge source of variation. We should want to know the answer to that question.
And a logical answer for that would be if drugs, mental illness and poverty are individual causes of homelessness, which they are, if you're poor mentally ill and addicted, you're more likely to experience homelessness, no doubt about it. So plausible explanation for regional variation would be if we have more people with these vulnerabilities in each of those cities, you'll have more homelessness. It turns out that's not the case. So it's a book about cities, not about people. This is not to discount person focused research, which is essential in this field, but this is really trying to understand what the heck is going on in Seattle or San Francisco or la. And the thesis of the book is that tight housing market conditions accentuate vulnerabilities and produce homelessness at higher rates in some cities than others. It's not who is in the city and their particular conditions.
So if I want to make an argument about variation, I want to at least demonstrate for you that there is huge variation in the United States. This is 2019 data pre COVID, you may know this, but some jurisdictions count homelessness at a county level and some count it at the city level. It doesn't matter. It's a bureaucratic difference. Neither way is right or wrong, but you can't compare counties to cities because all else equal counties will have lower per capita rates of homelessness because you're including suburban locations. So what we need to look at is city to city comparison, and what you'll see is New York is about 10 per capita and Indianapolis is about two five to one relationship. Huge variation, huge variation. When we move to counties, the numbers are lower for the reasons that I described. But what's really interesting is the relationship is still five to one.
LA County, Santa Clara, King County, which is my home county, and Multnomah are five, and Hillsborough, which is Tampa is one. So whether you're looking at cities or counties, it's a five to one relationship, which is massive, massive variation. It's not 30%, not 40% five times. Why is that? So the logic of the book is we look at three categories of explanations and we test an explanation and say, does this help us understand regional variation? If it doesn't, we cross it off and move on. And this is very, very basic statistics. We have more complex models and economists have much more complex models, but I've found out that people don't understand them and don't listen to them. So we try to use pretty simple models here. But if you really want to causal model, come see me afterwards and we'll talk about it. Poverty. Poverty causes homelessness.
There's no doubt about it. But what's interesting is when you plot poverty in rates of homelessness, you end up with an inverse relationship. And so what you'll see here is modest R squared. As R square gets closer to one to more powerful explanation. When you get to zero, it's basically no relationship. So there's a modest relationship here, but it's in the opposite relationship of what we would expect. Places with higher poverty tend to have lower rates of homelessness, which is a total head scratcher because poverty causes homelessness. So homelessness doesn't thrive in Detroit and Cleveland and St. Louis communities with really high rates of poverty. It thrives in affluent places like Seattle and San Francisco and Boston. The point is that being poor in a really affluent place is a problem for homelessness, mental illness, this is state level data. The data for drugs and mental illness are better at the state level than the cities.
But the logic is of the same here. There are people who experience serious mental illness in every state in the nation at varying rates, and it bears zero relationship whatsoever to rates of homelessness. So the problem in California and Oregon and Washington is not that we have a disproportionate presence of people who are experiencing mental illness. That's not the case. The consequences of mental illness in those states might be different, but it's not the mere presence. This is substance use disorders. Again, this R squared is basically nothing. There are people using drugs all over. This is when people start to get really mad at me and send me emails and they'll say, Gregg, this is a drug problem. Have you seen all the drugs in the street in Seattle? I'll say, absolutely, we do have a problem. Do you think people use drugs in Chicago?
They do. They do, and it's not manifesting itself as homelessness. And then when they get really mad, I say, well, why doesn't West Virginia have a homelessness problem home of the opioid epidemic in the United States? If this fundamentally were a drug problem, we should see massive homelessness there and we don't. So again, it's not to minimize the importance and the severity of the drug problem in our cities. It's absolutely an issue, but is not the disproportionate presence of drug users that is causing this crisis race. We can't talk about homelessness without talking about race. Black, brown and Indigenous people are three to four times overrepresented in the homeless population. What's interesting though is it is not the demographic makeup of a city that explains regional variation. Chicago has a much higher Black population than does Seattle, yet has far lower rates of homelessness. So it's not who is in the city and their racial or demographic makeup.
It is the context in which they live. So the point is race doesn't explain homelessness. Racism explains homelessness. Racism helps to explain who is more likely to experience homelessness within a particular community. The disproportionality in Seattle, it's a different base because Seattle is a disproportionately white city is 3.8 times in Chicago, it's 3.8 times. There's something systematic going on, and we know if you've studied inequity and racial inequity in the United States that we see this in the healthcare system, the education system, the housing system who was able to get a mortgage, who were able to live in this neighborhood. All of these things have happened generation after generation to produce these disproportionate outcomes. So these individual explanations don't help us understand the Seattle Chicago head scratcher. So now we need to move to some community level issues, which is where you are sitting, what the heck is going on?
We must be screwing up in our city to produce this crisis. The first one is weather. I would ask one thing if you leave here, please don't say weather causes homelessness or when someone does, you could say weather doesn't cause homelessness. I bet you 500 people have told me the reason we have a problem in Seattle is because we have moderate weather. And then people say, well, Gregg, LA's warm and Chicago's cold. Of course we've got homelessness in la. And I'll say, well, what about Miami and San Antonio and Phoenix, which don't have anywhere near the rates of homelessness of la and what about Boston, which has incredibly high rates of homelessness and it's terribly cold here in January. So the weather argument is convenient, but the problem is when you look at it at a national level, it doesn't hold up. And we can talk about sheltered versus unsheltered in the Q and A.
I want to move through this. There is a weather story there in the sense that West Coast cities have not constructed the same shelter capacity that east coast cities have, which is why it's more visible in Seattle than it is in Boston or New York where the vast majority of people are residing in shelter. Okay? The mobility argument, people are coming here because of really generous benefits. This is an incredibly prevalent argument. When I was getting my PhD at the University of Minnesota, everyone blamed homelessness in Minneapolis on people from Chicago. They're coming here because we're very generous. I said, oh, that's interesting. We studied it. We found no evidence of that. In my first meeting in Seattle, someone said, we have a problem here because we're really generous. I said, well, where are the people coming from California? I said, oh, that's interesting. I'm in meetings in California that said, we're a magnet for homelessness because we're very generous.
I said, you can't be. You're sending your people to Seattle. I said, where are your people coming from Texas? In the book, we include the example of Middletown, Ohio that believes they're a magnet for homelessness because of their incredible generosity. The point is, everyone can't be a magnet. Everyone believes they're a magnet. Margot Kal at University of California, San Francisco just published the best report ever on homelessness in California. 80 to 90% of the people experiencing homelessness in California are from California. This is a homegrown problem. It's inconvenient and it's frustrating because it's easier to blame someone from elsewhere. But the reality is homelessness is a homegrown problem. This is not a mobility story. This is TANF, the primary federal welfare program for women and children, huge variation state to state. It was baked into welfare reform under Clinton. What we see is there are generous states in their stingy states, and it bears no relationship to rates of homelessness.
Why? Because mobility is hard. When we moved a family of four to Seattle, we did it with every advantage under the sun and it sucked. We left people who loved and cared for us new schools for the kids new job. We didn't have any friends. Now, imagine doing that with zero resources. When people in Seattle say, Gregg, why don't they just leave? I get angry. Why do they have to leave? They were just priced out of a community that's been home for them for multiple generations, and now you're saying they should move to Topeka. That doesn't seem right. If social networks, and we know this from research are important for all of us, they become increasingly important. If you have very few resources, if a family member is the only person who can take care of your kids, are you really going to move to Topeka?
Not going to happen. So we've crossed off a bunch of explanations that we would argue are insufficient explanations for this variation. And I know we get to the punchline. I joke that no one's going to give us a Nobel Prize for this slide. It's just rents and homelessness. But where rents are high, homelessness is high, and we have lots of causal models that will make this same point. Our related variables, rental market, vacancy rates, which speaks to the availability of housing. When vacancy rates are low, homelessness tends to be high. This is also when people start to get angry with me. They'll say, yeah, and it's a lot of yeah, buts. And I'll say, well, give me an example of an expensive city with low vacancy rates that doesn't have a problem with homelessness. And then I get a blank stare and I'll say, I'll save you the time.
There isn't one. And also show me a place that has $800 rents, $800 rents, and 10% vacancies that has Seattle level rates of homelessness. There aren't any. Cities are moving up and down the spectrum, and I've been in probably 30 cities in the last year, many of whom are now seeing their rents going up and vacancy rates going down. And to date, they haven't had an issue. And they say, we're starting to see an issue. And I'll say, this is exactly why. And I joke that I'm like a Charles Dickens character, ghost of Christmas to come. Don't do what Seattle did. We just wait until the problem got so bad. And so that's been really fun to go to places like Indianapolis and Wichita and Raleigh and Charlotte and Lexington, Kentucky last week because they're at the point where they're starting to see compression in the housing market and they have time to act.
When I was in Silicon Valley, I mean, it was funny, someone in Raleigh said, what are you going to say in Palo Alto? And I said, I don't know. I got to figure that out. The most inhospitable housing market in the United States really, really difficult. So an obvious question, and one thing that I thought when I started writing this was, if we look at population growth, it should correlate really highly to homelessness. If you were asked people in Seattle, why do we have a problem here? Amazon hired a bunch, whole bunch of people, paid them a bunch of money, and they moved here and drove housing costs up, which is certainly part of the story. What's interesting though is when you plot population growth in homelessness, there's no relationship. I thought I'd screwed this up. I ran it three times. What I realized when I went into the actual cities is there are a lot of Sunbelt cities that are growing really fast, just as fast as Boston and Seattle, the coastal boom towns.
And so what I realized is I needed to change the analysis a little bit to incorporate supply. I apologize for having Greek letters on the screen past dinnertime. That's kind of unfair. But if you've taken an economics course, and you may remember the term elasticity and what elasticity measures is, if the price of a good changes, what is the supply response? If clickers go up 10 times tonight, what's going to happen tomorrow? Well, tonight the manufacturers of clickers are going to pop a bottle of champagne and toast, and then they're going to make a whole bunch of these two shifts, three shifts, whatever, very elastic, the supply would increase dramatically. If the price of housing goes up 10 times tonight, what happens tomorrow? Nothing. I need land. I need a permit. I need financing. I need a general contractor. So the elasticity of housing tends to be a lot lower supply elasticity than other goods.
And we know from urban economists that supplies elasticity varies city to city. The two drivers are topography. If you have mountains and water, it's harder to build San Francisco and regulatory environment. How easy it to build housing. San Francisco, if you have a really strict regulatory environment and you have challenging topography, you're going to end up with a really inelastic housing supply. San Francisco is the most inelastic housing supply in the United States. If you layer a tech boom on top of an inelastic housing supply, it is a recipe for disaster. And that's what we're experiencing in Seattle and San Francisco right now. So this graphically depicts what I'm talking about, the Y axis to supply elasticity. One is kind of the neutral point for elasticity above. One would be you build housing when prices go up below. One means you don't build enough housing, and the X axis is really a proxy for housing demand.
Population growth means more demand for housing. So the upper right quadrant is really interesting to me. Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas. These are places that grew very rapidly in the decade of the 2010s, but they built a bunch of housing and they were able to maintain a relatively relatively, I say, accommodating housing market. Those are vacancy rates in parentheses. Austin has now left that corner. They're now moving down. Their vacancy rates have fall into 2.5% rapid, rapid tightening of housing in Austin. The bottom right corner is tragic but entirely predictable. You have a population boom, you don't build any housing, you end up with really low vacancy rates, high rents, and a housing crisis. And it's a housing crisis for professors looking for housing. And it's a really bad crisis if you're on the margins. And that's why we have a massive problem with homelessness.
So because this is 2019 data, I did want to at least update some of this, and I don't have this slide memorized because this's new. So I'm going to kind of tilt here. For those of you looking at homelessness, it's really important to know that COVID messed up our counting. There's a lot of journalists who are publishing numbers that are inexact because in 2021, we only counted people in shelter and they said, look it homelessness went down in 2021. It didn't because we didn't count people who were unsheltered. We also didn't conduct the same types of surveys. So there's a period of 21, 22 and 23 to a certain extent where we need to just take it with a grain of salt. But generally speaking, the numbers that we have from the jurisdictions that have published the logic of this book holds. But what we're seeing is there are flashing warning signs in a few cities, Phoenix, Maricopa County, Travis County, which is Austin, Sacramento County, terrible – flight from the Bay Area, really bad homelessness and Atlanta.
And so unfortunately, the book, we are focused on coastal cities. And now what we're seeing is this problem is creeping into the inside of the country and they're starting to face the same pressures, which is a real, real problem. The biggest per capita rates still exist in our coastal, the big six. So one of my frustrations with this field is the argument that I hear all the time, which is, Gregg, we spent X million dollars, the problem got worse, therefore X doesn't work. And I really worry about that as someone who cares about public policy because that narrative undermines the public's confidence in our ability of government to deal with this crisis and what people don't realize. And when I was at UCLA a little while ago and someone said, we just had a 1 billion bonding measure for homelessness, and the problem got worse.
And I said, yeah, because you got a $50 billion problem, it doesn't mean the billion didn't work. The billion probably saved lives and got some people houses. It's just nowhere near the scale of what we need. So the investments that we made, it's also really important to note, are generally speaking what I would call operating investments. It is the crisis response system. It's shelters and it's services that we provide to people who are experiencing homelessness. They're lifesaving, and I think we have a moral obligation to make those investments, but we're fooling ourselves if that is in any way an intervention to prevent homelessness. We have not made capital investments upstream to prevent the flow of people entering homelessness. And as a result, this is a bandaid and it's an important bandaid and an honorable bandaid, but it is what it is. Shelters don't end homelessness. They get people off the street and put them in shelter.
They're still homeless. And so we really need to think as a nation about much larger investments in housing. I shared a story. I had a meeting with Governor Insley of Washington who I have great respect for, and he shared with me his plans for a multi-billion dollar state level initiative around housing, which I said, governor, that's fantastic. But what's interesting in our region, we passed a 55 billion measure on transit, yet the number we're talking about the shoot, the moon number for housing was 4 billion, less than 10%. Why? Because housing is a private good in the United States, and therefore we don't think about it at the same scale as other infrastructure projects. And therefore, when we have this massive need, it's really hard for us as a society, as cities to scale what we need because we just don't think about housing in that way. And that is a fundamental barrier that we have.
And I haven't even talked about land use yet. We could spend the whole night talking about land use, single family zoning, problematic. People also get really angry with me when I talk about that. So to wrap up here, the goal of this book was to hopefully change people's focus on this issue away from an individual failure. This is not a problem that's driven by individual failure. This is a structural problem. And structural problems require structural solutions. And that's scary because structural solutions tend to be complex. They require multiple levels of government and they're expensive. Those are three things that are a problem. But what structural problems require is it forces us to look in the mirror. When I'm walking down third Avenue in Seattle and I see Joe on the street, and if I think of this as I feel bad for Joe, but he made some poor choices, and I can go about my day.
If I see Joe as the consequences of structural failings in our society, it then forces me to go home and look in the mirror and say, Gregg Colburn has been a contributor to this, and what am I going to do? And that's scary for a lot of people, and that's where we are. Last thing, people will say, Gregg, fine, you got your fancy charts, but I'm not convinced housing is going to work. Joe's a mess. I hear this all the time. And I'll say, the reason why I'm confident is because we've done it a decade ago. The United States said, leaders of both political parties, we do not want veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan to experience homelessness like the Vietnam generation did. What happened? We had resources, the va, all these systems in place to make sure it didn't happen. And what happened? We cut veteran homelessness by 50% in 10 years, and how did we do it – we gave them housing. In some cases it was housing with services. If people had a mental health crisis or behavioral health challenges, we know it works. The debate should not be about which interventions work. We know they work. The question is one of scale and of values, where are we going to put our chips? And that's a question that right now remains unanswered, and we're living with the consequence of inaction on that. Unfortunately. Thanks for your attention. I really appreciate it, and thanks for having me.
Betsy Gardner:
I am interviewing Gregg Colburn, who's the associate professor of real estate at the University of Washington's College Built Environments, and author of the book, homelessness is a Housing Problem. Thank you for being here.
Gregg Colburn:
Great to be here.
Betsy Gardner:
All right. So at the start of your book, you say it's harder than it should be to find fact-check information. I'm sure you and your co-author, the data scientist Clinton Alburn must have encountered pretty much immediately. So if we could start from the beginning, how did you approach the issue of data and evidence when you first started thinking about writing this book?
Gregg Colburn:
Well, one of the motivations for the book was my frustration that a lot of the empirical evidence around the causes of homelessness had not filtered into the mainstream. And therefore, anecdote, press accounts, personal interaction, kind of dominated people's understandings. And therefore, what we really wanted to do was dive into the literature and existing research at our own research on top of that and try to communicate that in a very data-driven way.
Betsy Gardner:
So once you had the reliable data, you were able to start looking at causes, and that's where you discovered these regional variations. So how much of a surprise was it when you noticed that the absolute rent levels and the rental vacancy rates were associated with the regional rate variation rather than, like you said, personal accounts or stories of mental illness or substance abuse?
Gregg Colburn:
Yeah, it wasn't a terribly big surprise because we've known from existing research that high rental costs or the availability of housing is a causal driver of homelessness at the community level. What has been confusing for a lot of people is that the causes of homelessness differ at the individual level versus the community level. So at the individual level, if you are poor, if you're addicted, if you're mentally ill, you're more likely to experience homelessness. And those are the causes that people kind of grasp onto. Yet when you move to the community level and try to figure out why does Seattle have five times the homelessness of Chicago, those individual factors kind of melt away, and these structural housing market characteristics become the dominant driver, causal driver of rates of homelessness. And so we kind of knew that going in, but I will say as I laid out each chapter and each argument, things kept coming in even stronger than I would've thought. I was like, oh, well, this story is really coming together. And so that was kind of a pleasant surprise.
Betsy Gardner:
You now are understanding there's this individual level that could be affected by mental illness or substance abuse, but then there's this community or structural level. Should local leaders, should they run the data on their cities and see where they fall on the population growth by housing supply elasticity graph, how should they go about determining how much of it is this housing availability or rental availability problem? And then how can they find how much they're lacking to know the scope that they need to tackle?
Gregg Colburn:
So I've traveled to all sorts of cities. I don't know how many cities I've been to, probably 30 cities around the United States in different communities. And what I flagged for them is when I'm in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Boston, we kind of know the situation. Housing costs are really expensive. Rates of homelessness are really high. And so there isn't necessarily a lot of education that needs to be done there in the sense that you have a housing crisis, you know, have a housing crisis, and therefore we need to figure out how do we get out of that In other places, Louisville, Kentucky or Wichita or Indianapolis or Boise, other places that I visited, the conversation there is a little bit different, which is you do not have the same housing crisis that the coastal cities do, but in many of these places, there are increasing pressures in the rental market, and you can follow that by looking at just your median rents from census and what vacancy rates are.
And so what I tell communities is, as your vacancy rates get close to 5%, which is kind of the neutral point for rental market vacancies, that signifies that you're going to start to have a problem. And I've been surprised at how low vacancy rates are. I was just at the Housing Iowa conference last week in Cedar Rapids. The state of Iowa's vacancy rate is approaching 5%, which is really low for a state that's largely rural. These housing market dynamics around the country are really, really problematic. Even though you may not feel like you're in the midst of a crisis right now, if you let that continue, it will become crisis level, and that will exert huge pressure on poor households in your community if those vacancy rates come down and rents go up.
Betsy Gardner:
So if a city, like a mayor or city manager either knows from just general knowledge of there being housing crisis and a affordability crisis, or they are watching the data and they're like, oh, we're approaching that point. What is in their power to either increase housing supply or is it a combination of trying to increase supply and decrease cost? Because even when not talking about homelessness, like you said, people in Boston already know it's really hard to find a place to rent that they can afford. Of course.
Gregg Colburn:
Of course. Yeah, it's a really good question. And one of the challenges, and I try to be empathetic to local political leaders because they have a huge challenge in front of them and have not gotten great support from the federal government, from state governments. And now we're saying, mayor X, you have four years to figure this out, and if you don't, we'll vote you out. And to me, that is an unfair proposition, but it is what it is right now. And so what is in the control of local elected leaders? Certainly land use is in control. And so really thinking about how are we going to use our land, our disproportionate focus on single family zoning prevents and inhibits our ability to increase the scale of housing in our jurisdiction. So that's a battle that is being fought and needs to continue to be fought. And then obviously where there is potential to raise revenue, to support either low income households through cash assistance or to subsidize the construction of housing, that's important. But it's expensive, right? Housing is an expensive part of the household budget. And so if that falls solely on cities, that's a challenge, which is why we really need help from states and particularly the federal government, because there just hasn't been that support over the last 40 years. And so mayors and city councils are feeling that now.
Betsy Gardner:
So I like your point, about the fact that they only have four years and they're put in and it's like, we'll solve this.
Gregg Colburn:
Right.
Betsy Gardner:
Is there a kind of scaffolding or a triage that you recommend? Because I like the musical chairs analogy, and I think that there are those subsets where a hospital ER is on the front lines or a lot of the cities that we work with, there's a large influx of migrants. So is there a triage kind of leveling that they should do when trying to address this? Because constructing new housing might take quite a bit longer. So how do you approach when some of those subsets are more acute need?
Gregg Colburn:
Towards the end of our book, we highlight three tensions that make this hard, and one of them, which you've just highlighted, is the short versus long-term tension, which is we know that building permanent housing is the long-term solution ending homelessness, but the electorate is demanding an immediate response to this crisis, and therefore that's to a certain extent, a square peg in a round hole. We can't stand up and say, well, we're going to build housing and in 10 years we'll be fine in the interim, just deal with it. And so it needs to be a both end in the sense that there needs to be a crisis response. And to a certain extent, our crisis response to the United States has been the shelter system and in other supportive services that exist for people experiencing homelessness. And that's really important in lifesaving, but we shouldn't confuse that with an intervention to end homelessness.
Putting people in shelter doesn't end homelessness. It just recharacterize it from unsheltered to sheltered. And so on the east coast here in Boston and New York, the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in your community are in shelter. And part of that is because of litigation and now local rules, right? To shelter laws on the west coast, we have far more limited shelter capacity, and therefore there's much greater unsheltered homelessness. And so if you're the mayor of San Francisco or LA or Seattle, right now, the question is do you put resources into increasing shelter capacity? So you look more like Boston or New York recharacterizing homelessness, or do you devote those dollars to constructing housing, which might take a while? That's a really, really hard resource allocation question. And the answer is, you have to do both because voters are going to demand that you do something now.
And the unsheltered chronic homelessness crisis in those cities is to the point where it does require a solution. And so I'm not against building shelter. I think we do need more shelter capacity on the west coast, but I am against that being a bridge to nowhere, which is unfortunately, New York spends billions of dollars every year and warehouses, people in shelters for years and years and years at a time. And I don't think that's a model that we want to replicate in other cities that are kind of grappling with that. And so it's hard. So we have to do both and the resources to do both or in short supply, unfortunately.
Betsy Gardner:
One of the things when you're talking about the East Coast versus the West Coast, I've heard you talk a bit about how Detroit, it's a very high poverty city in the us, but it actually has very low homelessness. But what is the relationship between housing and housing scarcity when it's a hot housing market and a hot job market? So you could say, well, more folks should be in a place like Detroit where they have more available housing, but if that's not where jobs are, how you try to support both of those goals?
Gregg Colburn:
Right. That's a great question. Where we have affordable housing in the United States right now is not where employers are wanting to locate. And so that is, we have a spatial mismatch to a certain extent. And so we continue to attract employees to Boston and New York and Seattle and San Francisco and places that don't have housing. And so what I think is really important, and we highlight this towards the end of the book, and I've actually been really pleased on the road to have some communities start to talk about this. So I've been in Kentucky twice in the last six months, and there's a quote in a book, and it actually came from the former executive director of the King County Housing Authority, his quote, his name is Steven Norman. He said, homes are where jobs go at night.
So what's interesting is that, and we see this all the time with mayors and governors, is that when we announced a new plan, a manufacturing facility, a solar facility, whatever, we have a ribbon cutting and we cheer this job growth, yet there's no mention of where people are going to live. And usually new employees who are paid well, they're going to find housing. The people who've been employed by Amazon in my city, Seattle, they've all found housing because they have money. What happens is incumbents end up suffering when we don't build housing. And so it was really cool when I went back to Kentucky a couple weeks ago, the governor spoke right before me and he said, we are now going to pair economic development and housing. And so every time that we announce a new jobs program or a new employment program, we're also going to have a housing announcement.
Will that end homelessness? Oh, it won't, but it should help keep housing supply in line with employment growth. And I think what's happened in Seattle, San Francisco is you've had massive employment tech booms, wealth booms that have not had a commensurate housing construction. And as a result, we end up with this huge demand supply imbalance, which produces really low vacancy rates and really high rents, which hurts everyone, but it really hurts people who are most vulnerable. And so making sure that we align housing and employment is really important. I don't want the message to be that employment is bad, don't have someone come to your community. Now, Amazon HQ two is a story, but in terms of a solar plant in Kentucky, that's probably a good thing, good jobs, innovation, all this. But we hope that that doesn't then produce a housing crisis for the communities that are home to these new employment shocks.
Betsy Gardner:
So this wasn't a question that I had written down or anything, but as you were talking about this, is there a role that these companies should play when they come to a new place and there's that awareness that creating a demand for jobs could harm housing?
Gregg Colburn:
It's a really interesting question of what is the responsibility of corporate enterprises? We've had this debate in Seattle because of the disproportionate influence of Microsoft and Amazon. And so if you were to walk around Seattle right now, and people said, well, who's to blame for our housing crisis? Most people would probably say Amazon, because the influx of employment and wealth has been really remarkable. Same thing in Silicon Valley, but it's been more distributed across lots of companies. You've got Google and you've got Facebook. I mean, it is been Amazon and Microsoft to a certain extent as well. And so what's interesting is both Microsoft and Amazon have contributed in total about two and a half billion dollars towards affordable housing. And I think that came after recognition of their contribution to the housing crisis in Seattle. Now, it didn't come until it was at crisis proportions. I've actually been on record saying, I don't know that that's necessarily the right way to do things. I'm not a huge fan of corporate welfare because Microsoft is really good at developing software, and Amazon's really good at selling stuff online. And depending on how the business is going, their ability or willingness to invest in housing may go with the stock price.
And so if we're reliant on corporate enterprises for social welfare, what if they just say no? Then are we out of luck? And so my hope would be that corporate enterprises would partner with governments to say, we recognize that we need to construct housing and ensure that there's affordable housing for people as we grow. And that can be through supporting public policy that whether it's land use or revenue generation that's needed. What frustrates me, and we had this circumstance in Seattle about five years ago, was Seattle tried to pass a ahead tax to support money for housing and homelessness, and Amazon said, no. And that to me is an example, and they've turned the corner now and contributed money. And I think they've recognized that that was probably also from a PR standpoint, less than ideal. And so my hope would be it shouldn't have fall in the lap of Amazon or whatever employer, but hopefully you would see responsible corporate actors saying, let's partner with the public sector and make sure that we do what we need to do.
Betsy Gardner:
What you just said about a PR, that kind of brings me to my last question because you talk a lot in the book about how homelessness is politicized, and there's I think a lot of different takes on it that can kind of become like, is this a PR thing? Is this being used for some kind of political gain or statement? So how do you recommend city leaders try to work on these issues, both short term and the long term, while also trying to either shift public opinion or draw some kind of consensus or find a solution that they can gather a lot of support for when there's sort of a move to keep it politicized, maybe in some ways? How do you manage that?
Gregg Colburn:
[laughing] Well, if I had a good answer to that, I could probably be a good consultant.
I would say that I think it's really important for elected leaders, assuming they buy the arguments that have come out of the academic community around the causes of homelessness. And the arguments we make in the book is just to be really clear about that every time they're speaking on this issue. I've had this issue in Seattle where I've really been frustrated with press accounts around homelessness because for every housing article, there's 10 drug articles. And so it's not surprising that people then develop these misperceptions about the causes of homelessness. And so if you're then a mayor, to a certain extent, it feels like spitting into the wind because cultural forces are pushing in the other direction. And so I do think the messaging around this is really important and to say, we are in this problem because we don't have sufficient affordable housing. We have not constructed enough housing.
Our land use is really constrained, et cetera, et cetera, and these are the steps that we're taking. And I think it's also important to say that we're not going to fix this in six months. This is a problem that has been building for in San Francisco and Seattle for 25 years. And to think that we're now in six months going to do a 180 and resolved, this is not appropriate. Now, is that a strategy to getting reelected? I don't know. That's why I'm a professor, not a mayor. But I think being really clear about the structural causes of this and what it's going to take to get out of it is important. The last thing I would say is because this has been politicized and people are starting to undermine the credibility of evidence around housing first, for example, and saying it that it doesn't work.
It does work. And so the line that I always end my talks with is, if you don't think housing works, then explain for me the 50% reduction in veterans homelessness over the last 10 years. We made a political decision at the federal level that we didn't want veterans to experience homelessness, and I understand why that decision was made and what do we do? We gave people housing and some people, we gave them housing plus supports if they needed it, and we cut it by 50%. And so the interventions work. That debate should be done and dusted, unfortunately, it's not. The question then is, will we scale these investments, these interventions that we know work to a level that will allow us to reduce homelessness in our cities? And to date, we've said no to that, unfortunately. And so I think that's a really important part of the message as well, for local elected leaders who are caught in this really difficult spot.
Betsy Gardner:
It reminds me a little bit of the…almost…myth that people with severe mental illness are going to be the perpetrators of crime, and they're in fact much more likely to be victim of crime. And I think that's a similar sort of hurdle to try to get over before you can provide the appropriate care.
Gregg Colburn:
Yeah, I mean, we have all sorts of causal errors going in multiple directions and homelessness, and I think the crime is a good one. And then the drug use one is, and I say this all the time, I say this to people all the time, we know that homelessness causes drug use as well, because it's a really traumatic way to go through life. And it shouldn't be surprising if we leave someone on the street for a year that they medicate to get through the day. And so when we see someone on the street and they're addicted, we don't know if that addiction was the cause of their homelessness or a consequence of living in a very, very traumatic space. And that makes us complicated because people walking down the street say, oh, here's someone who's addicted. Of course they're homeless. And then that cements this understanding that is actually incorrect, unfortunately.
Betsy Gardner:
Yeah. Well, I hope maybe your next book, you could just figure out exactly how to tell the mayors just to do this, and then we'll have you back…
Gregg Colburn:
[laughing] Sounds great.
Betsy Gardner:
But yeah, thank you so much for talking today.
Gregg Colburn:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us@datassmartcities.org. Find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Steven Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.