Part one of Pathways Home, a six-part series on homelessness. Gregg Colburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem, dispels myths about the causes of homelessness and identifies two key risk factors that explain why rates vary so much between cities: high rents and low vacancies.
Part one of Pathways Home, a six-part series on homelessness. Gregg Colburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem, dispels myths about the causes of homelessness and identifies two key risk factors that explain why rates vary so much between cities: high rents and low vacancies.
Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. Two weeks ago, I shared that we're publishing a six part series on homelessness. And that starts today. We're calling it Pathways Home. And it features conversations on homelessness research that tackle the topic from multiple angles, and looks at what research can tell us about causes as well as solutions. Homelessness is the most publicly visible, personally catastrophic and politically fractious symptom of bad housing policy. I think it's also fair to say that it's the housing topic more than any other that people want to understand better and craft effective solutions for. Also more than any other housing topic, it demands our moral concern. We thought it deserved a special treatment on the podcast. Our first episode in the pathways Home Series is with Gregg Colburn, author of the 2022 book, 'Homelessness is a housing problem'. We chose to start here for a few reasons. One is because of its focus on upstream risk factors for homelessness, including and especially housing market conditions that come into play before you even begin looking at individual people and their challenges or pathologies. This and our next episode are primarily about the inflow of people into homelessness, and the remaining four focus on pathways out, pathways home if you will. Another reason we put this one first is that Greg just does a great job of laying out the misconceptions many people have about who becomes homeless and why , and those misconceptions can help explain the resistance we so often see to evidence-based solutions. In many ways, this episode takes a very broad view. It establishes why homelessness is a housing problem, but also why homes are just one part of its solution however indispensable. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Jason Sutedja, Divine Mutoni and Gavin Carlson. If you have questions, comments or ideas, send them my way at shanephillips@ucla.edu. And with that, here's our conversation with Greg Colburn.
Gregg Colburn is Associate Professor in the Randstad Department of Real Estate in the College of the Built Environment at the University of Washington, my undergrad alma mater, and he's with us to talk about the structural factors that explain why rates of homelessness vary so much from region to region throughout the United States. Greg, thanks for joining us, and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.
Gregg Colburn 2:45
Thanks, Shane. Great to be here. Hi, Mike.
Mike Manville 2:47
Hey, how are you?
Shane Phillips 2:48
There's my co host Mike Manville. Hey, Mike,
Mike Manville 2:51
Good to see you both excited about talking about this book.
Shane Phillips 2:54
So Greg, we always have our guests give us a quick tour of a place they know well, I believe you're going to give us a tour of Chicago.
Gregg Colburn 3:01
I am yeah. As an adult I've lived in order New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and now Seattle. So I just keep moving west, and I'm running out of space in this country.
Shane Phillips 3:09
There's always Hawaii.
Gregg Colburn 3:10
Yeah, there is Hawaii or Anchorage maybe. And so I wanted to talk about Chicago because I love the city. My wife and I lived there when we first got married, our first child was born in Chicago. And so it has a lot of meaning to us. I also think from a housing perspective, there is so much history that's important in Chicago. And one thing that I find interesting is as we talk about housing in the United States, and I know you travel around a lot, too is we talk a lot about our coastal cities, and we talk about the Sunbelt, and we many times ignore this really, really big city in the middle of the country. So what I love about Chicago is the lake, I think, I would argue it's the best urban run in the United States; running along the lake shore and you can basically go from Evanston all the way down past the University of Chicago, uninterrupted ride a bike, run whatever you want to do. I'm a sports person. It's a great sports town. I love Wrigley Field. I'm a twins fan. I grew up in Minnesota. So I go to Kentucky and see the twins when they would come to town. Go see the Vikings when they would play at Soldier Field. You know, the museums, Museum of Science and Industry, I would argue is maybe one of the great museums in the world, fantastic place. Two great universities, well, multiple universities, but you got University of Chicago, Northwestern right there. You got UIC, which is a wonderful urban institution. And you know, restaurants and in everything you could imagine. So it doesn't have great weather. And so when I talk to my students, and they complain about housing classes, like you should look at Chicago and they say, well then I'd have to live in Chicago in January and I say that's true. That is true. But aside from that, it's kind of a hidden gem, in my opinion in the country. And it's it's a lot more affordable. In fact, our daughter was now in college, took a personal finance class in high school and they had to look at household budgets. And one of the assignments which I thought was a great assignment and we were delinquent as parents. They had to look at what a budget would look like in Seattle and then they pick one other city and she picks Chicago she came home she's like, why don't more people live in Chicago. That's a good question. She's like, you can actually afford to live there; you can rent affordably, you could buy a house you know, and I think it's probably true for your students at UCLA. But I hear all the time them saying, there's no chance we're ever gonna be able to buy a house in Seattle, whereas in other communities, that is a possibility. So anyway, that's my shout out to my friends in the Midwest.
Shane Phillips 5:13
That's great. I hear the 'I'm not going to ever be able to afford a home' from people my age in Los Angeles, so it's not even just limited to people younger
Mike Manville 5:22
I am broadcasting from my rental unit.
Gregg Colburn 5:26
Exhibit A and B.
Shane Phillips 5:27
And speaking of all the travel, I am broadcasting from a hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Mike Manville 5:32
Very affordable.
Shane Phillips 5:35
Yeah, it is. It's still pretty affordable. I got a blanket hanging on the wall behind me. I got some towels elsewhere on the wall really trying to dampen the sound here as much as possible. But I have my perfect home studio. But yeah, okay. So today we are talking about a book whose title and central argument are no doubt familiar to many of our listeners, even if they have not read this book. The title is 'Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. patterns'. This was published by the University of California Press in 2022, and the authors are Greg Colburn, and Clayton Aldern and I think it is fair to say this book has had a pretty big impact, helping change or refine many people's understanding of homelessness. The books goal, if I could sum it up in a sentence or two is disentangling individual risk factors for homelessness from structural risk factors, but also showing how the two are related. This is what Brendon O' Flaherty described almost 20 years ago as the conjunction of wrong person and wrong place. As you put it in your own book, and I'm paraphrasing here, if someone wants to understand why a given person in Seattle is homeless, while another is not, individual risk factors, like job loss or interpersonal conflict or mental illness are often helpful. But if you want to know why the rate of homelessness is five times higher in Seattle than in Chicago, you need to look at structural factors. And as your book very persuasively argues, the main structural factors are high rents, and low rental vacancies, both sets of factors, individual and structural matter. But they matter in different ways, and the research behind them is or has been very often misapplied to the wrong questions. So I think the best place for us to start is in the last 20 or 30 years of homelessness research. We have two general kinds of studies of risk factors for homelessness, which are the city level or jurisdiction level. And then the individual level analyses, way back in 2004, Flaherty said, quote, the two types of studies seem to support contrasting policy advice. City-level studies, say reduce rents and increase vacancies, individual-level studies say work on pathology and poverty. Could you contextualize that comment for us, ahat were these two types of studies finding? And why did this matter?
Gregg Colburn 7:59
Well, I think both lines of inquiry are really important. And so if we think about the individual line, a lot of that research was being done by scholars in schools of medicine, schools of nursing schools of social work public health, trying to understand what the risk is for Person A to be homeless, or what are the proper interventions for someone who is experiencing homelessness. And those are all really worthy endeavors. The second line was being done typically in the past by economists who are saying structurally what's going on to explain rates of homelessness at the community level. The challenge for this is, most people if you haven't gone to graduate school, and you say the term 'unit of analysis', their eyes will glaze over, they don't understand what that means. And so my observation when I moved to Seattle in 2017, was we have these two lines of research that are pretty well documented and supported throughout the literature. Yet, public perception is vastly influenced by the one line of inquiry, which is individually based, and I think, also, personal experience and anecdote have also played into that. And so generally speaking, the narrative, whether it's in the press, whether it's among policymakers, were very individually focused in this other line of inquiry that is important and well done was, in my opinion, under appreciated, and therefore we were applying individual causes to community level challenges, and therefore not having much success. And that's why I wanted to really write a translational book that highlighted these community-level drivers, because fundamentally, if Seattle wants to reduce its level of homelessness, we have to focus on structure. Otherwise, we're just playing 'Whack a Mole' with all these different explanations, individual explanations.
Shane Phillips 9:40
Can you say a little bit about the different conclusions that the city-level and individual-level studies were reaching? And then, you know, how that was intention and how ultimately we or you resolve this tension?
Gregg Colburn 9:55
Well, I think, you know, the conclusion of individual-level studies would be that if you're poor, if you're addicted, if you're mentally, you're more likely to experience homelessness. No doubt about it. And I would never dispute that fact. And the community-level conclusions would say that if people aren't able to access housing, your community will have higher rates of homelessness. And so is that a conflict or are they just complementary ways of knowing about a complex phenomenon, so I don't see it so much as a conflict as it is, just explaining two different ideas. If you're trying to explain, as you said, who's likely to experience homelessness, it's an individual factors matter. And if you're trying to explain regional variation, these community level factors matter. And the problem, the conflict arises when you start to think about policy solutions. And this is a little bit of an overgeneralization. But I say if we, if I had a magic wand, and I wish I did, I could end all addiction and mental illness in Seattle, tomorrow, we'd still have a problem with homelessness. It might manifest itself a little differently, and it might have a different community impact but the reality is, there still is a structural driver here going on even if we eliminate these troubling individual issues, those structural factors don't go away.
Shane Phillips 11:00
So in addition to reviewing the homelessness research of the past few decades, in your book, you also contribute your own findings. And I want to get into those early in this conversation. You look at a range of common explanations for why some places have higher rates of homelessness than others. And you break these explanations down into three categories, which are the local prevalence of individual risk factors like poverty, and substance abuse, landscape conditions, like weather and generous social services, and housing market conditions. We'll get into the details shortly. But first, just give us an overview of what you found.
Gregg Colburn 11:36
Yeah, so the logic of the book is, as you mentioned, Shane, that question he poses, why do rates of homelessness vary so widely throughout the United States? And so what we do is we take all the conventional explanations, and we test using very simple statistics, does this help us understand regional variation? If it doesn't, we cross it off, and we move to the next one. And so that's really the logic of the book. And as we will walk through this, what you'll see is, many of these conventional individual risk factors and causes, they are causes at the individual level, don't explain regional variation. And so what you then see with these pretty simple bivariate analyses is housing costs and vacancy rates emerge as by far the most compelling explanation of regional variation, which therefore, I would argue, and I think Clayton, my co-author would also argue is then that deserves some focus and attention from policymakers, if we're trying to, you know, limit high rates of homelessness in places that have a huge issue.
Mike Manville 12:27
I think, you know, the real importance of walking through this is that I think will really drive home what I think Greg has been saying, which I think is the great contribution of this book, and I'm going to try and restate it slightly is just like, the way this comparison works is that if two people share a housing market, and one's homeless, and the other isn't, when you want to know why, and oftentimes, that's going to be some individual factor, you know, they have low income, they have an addiction problem, they have a mental illness. But if two people in different parts of the country share a personal struggle, they have low income, they have an addiction, they have a mental illness, but one is homeless, and the other isn't? Well, then you might think something's going on with the housing market, right? And so sort of walk through this, you know, you would say, well, if poverty really was the driving factor across the country, well, then what you would see is that like, places with more poverty, all else equal would have more homelessness. But if poverty is just something that exacerbates the risk of homelessness within a housing market, then you would look at to people who have equally low incomes in different places, and you would expect one to have a higher chance of being homeless if they were in a place where the rent was very high, or the housing market was very tight. And so I do think it's a very worthwhile exercise, even if like, right, well, we said at the beginning, that we're gonna walk through all these different correlations. I think it just drives this point home that the book makes, that really is I think, why the book has made such a splash, right? Like, that's the point that like people need to hear.
Shane Phillips 14:07
Yeah, so let's, let's walk through those. I don't know if you have the list on hand, or if you've gone through all of them enough, Greg, that you can just remember all of the analyses you did. I mean, I think there's about a dozen in total, but starting with the individual factors. Let's go through those and just talk about what you found.
Gregg Colburn 14:24
Sure, and I think poverty is a great one to start on, because no one would argue that poverty doesn't cause homelessness. Homelessness is absolutely a poverty problem. What's interesting is when you plot poverty and rates of homelessness, places with really, really high rates of poverty, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, etc, have far lower rates of homelessness than very affluent communities like Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. And so what I see in my public presentations to people is this is a head-scratcher. What I'm telling you and what the academic community is telling you is that poverty causes homelessness at the individual level. Yet at a community level, it is not the prevalence or, you know, disproportionate prevalence of poverty that produces high rates of homelessness. And so what's really important is the takeaway should not be that poverty doesn't matter. That's not the takeaway. The takeaway is that being poor in an affluent community has very different consequences than being poor in a place like Cleveland or Detroit where housing is more accessible. So it is not suggesting that Detroit doesn't have issues. It's not suggesting that poverty isn't a fundamental social problem, the United States that deserves attention. What the point is, is that if we want to understand why Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and DC have high rates of homelessness, it's not because we have more poor people. In fact, we have fewer poor people than a lot of other cities in the United States.
Mike Manville 15:39
Yeah, I mean, just to put a point on that, one of the hallmarks of a place that has a high rate of poverty is that it's economically depressed.
Yes.
Right. I mean, that's the New York City has many more poor people than Detroit, right. But it has a much lower poverty rate, because people of all different incomes want to be in New York, because it's growing, and it has all sorts of opportunity. And so a place with a high poverty rate, one correlate of that is going to be high levels of vacancy and low levels of brand. And this is, you know, there's a great paper from 2004, called 'Urban Decline in Durable Housing', right, which is just like, when places decline, people leave, but the structures are still there. So what do you see happen, you see housing prices fall, and so that doesn't to Greg's point, make the poverty any less of a social emergency. But it does suggest that like, the chances of any given low-income person being housed are much higher.
Shane Phillips 16:34
And so what else, what else did you look at? I think unemployment might have been next in the list.
Gregg Colburn 16:39
Yeah, unemployment is a similar story, with poverty, in the sense that places with high levels of unemployment tend to have lower rates of homelessness, really, really tight job markets, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, low rates of unemployment, but still high rates of homelessness. And so those two stories are almost siblings, in a sense - very similar analysis and outcomes and interpretations. The other individual factors that get a lot of attention are drugs and mental illness. And I've learned through this process that writing a book about homelessness, you have to develop a somewhat thick skin. And this is where people start to get a little irritated with me. And I will say, generally, the response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive, but there is a vocal minority that sends me angry emails with four letter words in them. And many times they sent around drugs. And so I think it is important to talk about that. And so as I say, in my public presentations, and as we see in the book, we are not suggesting that drugs aren't a problem. We have a Fentanyl crisis in Seattle, that scares the crap out of me. What we are saying in the book is that people are using drugs and are addicted to drugs in every state in the nation, at varying levels of varying rates, and that that variation bears zero relationship to rates of homelessness. And so what you'll see if you if you see the book, or one of my presentations is that there's basically a flat line between rates of serious mental illness and substance use disorders, and rates of homelessness. And so when people start to get a little irritated or agitated and say, "Well, Greg, this is obviously a drug problem. I saw Joe on the street, there was a needle next to him". I'll say it's true, but you don't think people use drugs in Chicago? And then I'll say, "well, if you're really irritated, explain West Virginia, for me, the home of the opioid epidemic in the United States, opioids have ravaged that state, it is an absolute tragedy, yet, homelessness is not one of the consequences of that situation". And so it's a convenient narrative, and it's shaped by individual research showing that drug use increases the individual risk of experiencing homelessness, and more importantly, it's shaped by public narratives driven by media and personal columns for you walking around LA and us walking around in Seattle. I understand why people reach that conclusion but it's false. And it's this idea of that if you are experiencing addiction in a place with a very, very tight, challenging housing market, you're the one who's most likely to lose, and that, you know, vicious game of musical chairs that we talked about in the book. And I think the other point that's important in the drug conversation and mental illness as well, is there's by directionality in the causation, right. My addiction certainly might cause me to experience homelessness. We also know that mental illness and drug use are a consequence of homelessness. Experiencing unsheltered homelessness on the street is unbelievably traumatic. People are exposed to physical and sexual assault, they're not sleeping, they're not eating, they're not getting regular medical care. The fact that people would develop behavioral health disorders in response to that crisis or trauma should not surprise anyone, right? And I say to people, if I were experiencing unsheltered homelessness, I would medicate, and it wouldn't be the red wine that I had last night. And so when we see someone on the street, we don't know that that's the cause or the consequence. And the reality is, is we're just identifying these individual risk factors are sorting mechanisms to identify the people who are most likely to experience homelessness when housing is scarce.
Mike Manville 19:51
I completely agree with that. And I think as someone who's lived in mid St. Los Angeles for a long time, I can relate to that. that sort of intuition, right? You know, yes when I lived in West Hollywood, you go out in the morning walking the dog, and there's someone curled up around a pipe. And I know this research, I know that there's a structural factor, but there's a part of me when I look at it, and I'm just like, "Oh, my God, like it's drugs". And I think, you know, the other thing, having had not as many conversations, I'm sure as you have had with people who are skeptical, but having a few, and I think this is something we'll maybe return to later in the podcast is this - there's a distinction between identifying the cause of this problem, and then drawing a conclusion about well, there's that person with a drug addiction on the street, what do we do about that person? You know, because I think sometimes rhetorically, these get conflated. And when you say, well, this is caused by a tight housing market, what they think you mean is something like no one needs to treat addiction once it exists. And I think I just want to put a pin in that because it's something to come back to, because I think it is another big source of misunderstanding surrounding the relationship between sort of homelessness policy drugs, and I'm sure we'll get into in a moment mental illness as well.
Shane Phillips 21:04
We will get to the precipitating factors or precipitating events, for sure, because that is a really important kind of framing of this and way of thinking about it. Greg, before we move on to the landscape factors, do you want to talk a little bit about mental illness specifically?
Gregg Colburn 21:19
Yeah, the mental illness data are remarkably similar to the drugs data, which is there are varying levels of serious mental illness in states across the United States. And it bears almost zero relationship to rates of homelessness. And so the consequences of mental illness are different in different places. And so we can't blame the homelessness crisis in western states and cities on disproportionate numbers of people experiencing serious mental illness. Yeah. And I think the last individual factor that's really important is to talk about race. Yes, black, brown, indigenous people are three to four times over represented in the population of people experiencing homelessness. And so we can't have a conversation about homelessness without talking about race. But what's interesting is when you plot the racial or demographic makeup of a city against rates of homelessness, you don't see a relationship. So Chicago has a much higher black population than Seattle, which is a disproportionately White City, yet has far lower rates of homelessness. So what I say in my talks is that race doesn't explain homelessness. Racism, explains homelessness. Racism explains in multiple structures and institutions, explains why Black people are three to four times over represented in the population of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle. And it's the same level disproportionate level of representation in that population in Chicago. Different bases, and so the total numbers are different. But what we see is disparities in education and the labor market and health care, housing market, etc, help to explain who is more likely to experience homelessness, in this case, it tends to be people of color.
Mike Manville 22:49
Just to follow up, is that a place-based attribute racism or person based?
Gregg Colburn 22:55
Well, I would say that it would be a structural discrimination, structural racism is somewhat equal throughout society in the sense that black people are equally disproportionately represented in the homeless population in Chicago and Seattle from very different bases. So what I say is it helps to identify who's likely to experience homelessness in the city, not explaining regional variation, if that makes sense.
Mike Manville 23:18
It does. I guess if I was a devil's advocate, I would say, well, there just seems to be so much less homelessness in Mississippi. And it's hard to believe that Mississippi is just substantially less racist by some definition than Seattle is.
Gregg Colburn 23:33
No question. But if yes, in Chicago is highly segregated. Both of those places have very accessible housing markets. What I'm trying to explain is that disproportionality doesn't change that much city to city.
Shane Phillips 23:48
So whether your population is 10%, black or 50%? Black? That's right. They're still three to four times their shared population amongst the unhoused population.
Gregg Colburn 23:58
Yes
Shane Phillips 23:59
Relative to the overall population.
Gregg Colburn 24:01
Right, and so if you're saying Chicago, Seattle, Mississippi, similar levels of disproportionality, but very different levels of overall homelessness, so the question then becomes, is it because levels of racism are different. I would argue, probably not or the impact of structural injustice is probably not the driver that differences accessible housing is, I guess, the way that I would answer that.
Shane Phillips 24:27
So I think that mostly covers the individual risk factors. Let's move on to the landscape, which does not only mean things like the weather, but the weather is the first thing you looked at. And you know, living in California, it is very frequently pointed to as the reason or one of the major reasons for why we have a lot of unhoused people, you know, basically it is easier to be homeless here than elsewhere. What did you find in your research on this?
Gregg Colburn 24:51
Well, this is, you know, if you want to talk about cocktail party conversations around homelessness, this is the number one and so I always plead With my audiences, if you leave with one point, please leave with the weather point. And then you can intervene in a in a cocktail party when people are blaming the homelessness in LA on the weather. Greg, it's warm in LA, it's cold in Chicago, of course, I would want to be homeless in LA and a story. And that narrative plays out over and over and over again. So for listeners who aren't as familiar with the data that we use, so total homelessness is the number that we're focused on total homelessness includes people who are unsheltered, and then people who are residing in the shelter system. And so when we talk about overall rates of homelessness, we're including both of those categories. When you plot overall rates of homelessness, what you'll see is there six places with really high rates, New York, Boston, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, LA. And what you'll see is there's great variation in weather among those cities, Boston's terribly cold in January and they've got just as high on a per capita basis levels of homelessness as Los Angeles. They're also warm places Miami, San Antonio, Dallas, Phoenix that have lower rates of homelessness that are also mild in January. So the weather story is convenient when comparing Chicago and LA. But when you zoom out to a national lens, it doesn't hold up. Where the story does hold up, and where there might be some evidence here is the policy response, East Coast cities have constructed very robust shelter systems which houses give or take 95% of the people experiencing homelessness in shelter. Therefore, visible unsheltered homelessness is less prevalent in East Coast cities. West Coast cities for a variety of reasons have not constructed robust shelter systems that say it's 50-50. So half the people experiencing homelessness are on the streets and are visible. Therefore, the visible manifestation of homelessness may correlate with weather to a certain extent. And one of the reasons we may not have constructed robust shelter systems in LA is because people aren't going to die in January, whereas they will in Boston, if they're outside
Shane Phillips 26:43
To be clear, some still do but not in nearly the rates that they would...
Gregg Colburn 26:48
Absolutely
Shane Phillips 26:49
... sort of like New York. Yeah, I just want to be clear that it is still, there is never a pleasant time to be out, living on the street, and January in Los Angeles is not a great time to be out there especially. But yeah, the point stands that if 50% of people were sleeping on the street in New York in January, the deaths would number in the hundreds, probably at least
Gregg Colburn 27:09
Or 1000s. Yes, no, thank you for saying that because obviously, mortality rates among people experiencing homelessness are exceedingly high. And so it's probably being a little flippant there but the point stands. So that's kind of the narrative. And so I think, again, like with these other ideas, we have this anecdote and personal experience that shapes our understanding. Well, what i hear is Greg, I was just in New York City, they don't have a problem with homelessness. People have told me that in Seattle, and I say, well, they have the biggest homeless population, the United States, they're hiding it. They're hiding it.
Mike Manville 27:37
I think all of us have heard the weather related explanation, especially anyone who lives in California. And I think the two things that I often think about when I think about it, in addition to what Greg just said, is one, there's an assumption of mobility here that is hard to square with what we know about our homeless populations, which is like, the way it's often phrased is like, "Yeah, okay, if you had the choice of being homeless in Chicago or Los Angeles, you would go to Los Angeles". But also, if you're on the verge of homelessness, when are you going to jump on a plane to LA from Chicago, I mean, that takes some money. And so you could sort of phrase it in a more defensible way, which is just like a person on the margin of being unhoused in these two cities, one would be more likely to choose to be unhoused than otherwise. But even that sort of, you know, once you've gotten to that margin, you already have a huge problem. The other thing, which is related to Shane's point, which is that a lot of people who have never been to Los Angeles think it's Miami, right? That it's always warm all the time. And actually, Los Angeles has a desert climate. And at night, it's pretty cold in the winter, like it is not anywhere near as cold as Boston or New York, for sure. I grew up in Boston, it gets really cold there but it'll be in the 40s. And that's a very unpleasant temperature to sleep outside on the street. You know, so yes, it's preferable to Boston, but it's no one's first choice.
Shane Phillips 29:01
Yeah, and there's sort of an implication of intent to be homeless among the homeless population, where it says though, someone is moving to Los Angeles to be homeless, when we have plenty of data showing that people who are homeless kind of wherever they live, tend to have been last housed in that place in that city or county or metro area. You know, I think to the extent that people are from somewhere else and become homeless here, they move here and have housing for a while and then lose it or they move here, try to find housing and do not succeed.
Mike Manville 29:36
Yeah, I mean, I think you know, it's a big wide world with hundreds of millions of people has there. Has there been a situation where someone in Ohio has said to themselves, I'm moving to LA and if things don't work out, it's nice there. I'll sleep on the street? Probably.
Shane Phillips 29:50
Yeah, absolutely.
Mike Manville 29:51
Those people can't possibly explain our homeless population.
Shane Phillips 29:55
No, no. Okay, let's move on. We have a bunch of other questions, but we do want to get through all these or the major associations first, I feel like this could be the whole interview and it would be a worthwhile exercise. However long it takes, it's worth it. But you have a few other landscape factors. Let's go to generous social services and welfare.
Gregg Colburn 30:15
Sure, and this gets back to the mobility argument that Mike was just referring to. You know, next to weather, the mobility argument is probably the most common explanation that I get; that if we weren't so generous, we wouldn't have this problem with homelessness. And I heard this argument first in Minneapolis when I was in graduate school and people were blaming people from Chicago. I moved to Seattle first meeting, they said we if we weren't so generous, we wouldn't have a problem of homelessness. I've heard this in California, Middletown, Ohio, we refer to this in the book, they believe they're a magnet for homelessness because of their generosity. And so I'm not a physicist, but I don't think this is how magnets work. Everyone can't be the recipient or the destination. And so we've known through social science research, and in fact, to give a plug on some recent research from California, Margo Kachelle, at UCSF, she and her team just published an outstanding summary of homelessness in the state of California.
Shane Phillips 31:03
We just recorded an interview with her and it will be episode after this one.
Gregg Colburn 31:07
Wonderful, wonderful. I was just with Margo in Washington, DC this week at the National Alliance and we've been kind of hopscotching around the nation talking about homelessness, I think the world of Margo and her work is is remarkable. You know, one of the key takeaways from that study was, you know, I think it was 90% was the number of people who are experiencing homelessness in California are from California. And so this generosity argument and the tool that we use in the book is looking at steep variation in TANF, which is the primary welfare program for largely women and children. There's big state-to-state variation that was baked into the legislation under Clinton's welfare reform in the 90s. And what we see is there are generous states and there are stingy states and a very zero relationship to rates of homelessness. The takeaway shouldn't be that benefits don't matter. That's not the point. The point is that we don't see people sitting in Seattle going "Look at look at Des Moines, look at Iowa's TANF benefits, you know, maybe I'll maybe I'll go to Iowa or LA or wherever". And so that variation doesn't explain why some places have high rates of homelessness. We also know from the mobility literature, that mobility among low-income households is actually quite high within a city, because leases are one year and you see a lot of cycling, residential cycling, what you see is very low state-to-state mobility. Because Moving is hard, it's expensive. It's traumatic, you're leaving social networks. And so if you're at the end of your rope, to use Mike's example, are you going to sit in Chicago and say, "Boy, you know, I think I'm going to relocate to LA", or the example I always use this to Pica. People say to me all the time, "Greg, why don't they just leave", which actually makes me a little angry. This has been their home, they've been priced out of their home, and now we're saying "why don't you move to Topeka, Kansas?" One, how are you going to get to Topeka? You have no social network in Topeka, and once you get there, what are you gonna do? And so this idea that this is just a mobility argument is prevalent yet there's very, very little evidence to suggest that this is the driver of high rates of homelessness in our coastal cities.
Mike Manville 32:53
I think a lot of this stems back to you mentioned welfare reform. You know, a lot of the the initial impetus for welfare reform stems from this one anecdotal relationship between Chicago and Milwaukee, right, which is it was a 90-minute bus ride on the Greyhound, it was relatively inexpensive, and Wisconsin was just much more generous than Illinois with TANF, it wasn't TANF at that time, but AFC DC benefits. And Tommy Thompson famously said, like we're absorbing all these people. They did not subsequently become homeless, right? These were sort of the working poor but it ingrained, I think, in a generation of policymakers and news consumers an idea of this high rate of mobility, welfare magnet stuff. And while there's no credence to it, I think the research clearly demonstrates that it's much larger within a metropolitan area right? There are some areas that are much friendlier on a number of policy environments to low-income people than others. But yeah, getting across the country, I mean, it's just not something someone without a lot of money has the ability to do.
Gregg Colburn 33:54
That's right. I think the other landscape one that is worth discussing is local politics, which certainly speaks to generosity a certain sense, but you know, President Trump and Governor Gavin Newsom of California got into a big spat about this, and, you know, while Trump was in office. Trump, of course, blaming Democrats in California and on the west coast for homelessness and Gavin Newsom, firing back and saying, "well, if the government hadn't stepped away from supporting low-income households in terms of federal housing policy, we wouldn't have this issue". We argue in the book that neither of those are sufficient arguments. If federal retrenchment were the cause, we shouldn't see huge variation, everyone would be equally starved of federal resources. Trump's argument that Democrats are the cause fails to account for the fact that Democrats run Cleveland and Chicago and Baltimore and St. Louis and have for longer than I've been alive. And so it's a really simplistic argument that doesn't hold up. Is it true that Democrats run Seattle, San Francisco and LA, of course, no one's going to dispute that. So what I say on the road is that's too simple of an argument. Now, are Democrats blameless in these cities? No, that's not the point. There are plenty of things done around regulation and housing production that we'll get into that I think a lot have Democrats both governors and mayors in West Coast states and cities need to account for, because there's been a significant consequence there. But the idea of just permissive policies or generous local benefits driving this is not sufficient to explain this variation.
Shane Phillips 35:16
I think that's a pretty good transition to the housing market conditions and the associations there. So you looked at several things. And maybe we can start with the housing cost burden or the rent burden, because this is one where I think people might imagine there would be an association, and yet you did not find one. So can you tell us what this metric is, and what you found there, and maybe why you imagine that was the result?
Gregg Colburn 35:40
Sure. So the cost burden is the percentage of household income that a household spends towards housing, the standard measure would indicate that above 30%, that household would be considered cost-burdened. And that maps with the contribution that households use in federal housing policy as well in terms of the percentage of their income that they contribute when they get a voucher or public housing. And so when you look at rates of cost burden levels of cost burden and cities around the United States, it's actually remarkably consistent. It's more consistent than I would have thought when I started to study issues of cost burden. And so what we did is we compare rates of cost burden to rates of homelessness and didn't find much of a relationship. A couple of reasons why we think this; one is, and this is my favorite housing statistic that always gets a while at a cocktail party, which is, what city do you think has a higher median housing cost burden, Detroit or San Francisco. 99% of people will say, of course, San Francisco, and in fact, Detroit has higher cost burdenness. Why does Detroit have higher across borders, their housing is really cheap, their incomes are unbelievably low. And therefore on a percentage basis, households are spending a lot of money on housing. San Francisco has terribly expensive housing, but their incomes are remarkably high at the median or mean, high minimum wage, and obviously a lot of high wage labor in that community. And so when you plot cost burden, and you've got radically different rates of homelessness in Detroit and San Francisco, yet they have the same cost burden, what you see in this relatively simple analysis is not a lot of relationship. Now, there has been other research that has looked at more communities, you know, our sample is the 30 largest metros in the United States. And when you branch out, there has been research showing that when you get above 35%, that community, there's an acceleration of rates of homelessness. And we also know that cost burden at the individual level certainly puts strain on households and increases the risk of experiencing homelessness. So the point is not that cost burden doesn't matter. I would never make that argument. What we would argue is that that doesn't help us explain why you have San Francisco has way more homelessness, than Detroit.
Shane Phillips 37:35
Yeah, and so the main event, the factors that actually have a very strong positive correlation with rates of homelessness at the city and county level, absolute rents and rental vacancies, give us that context.
Gregg Colburn 37:51
That's right. And so you know, the two factors that jumped out in the analysis and just a backup for one moment, you know, the purpose of this book was really a translational piece. We overlay our own research on this, but this is all supported by more complex models that have looked at this in a causal sense. And we ran our own models there as well. The reason we didn't frame the book around those models is people don't understand coefficients. This is true in econometric models. And therefore, we feel comfortable using these relatively simple bivariate relationships, because it's supported by more complex research findings. And so I always joke on my on my talks around the country, that when we plot rents and homelessness, what we see is an upward sloping line with a much higher R squared than anything else we show and I say, "No one's gonna give us a Nobel Prize for this, for this analysis, you know, a 10th grade statistics student could do this". But the point is that it's a far more compelling explanation than anything else we test. And when you layer vacancy rates on, which is when vacancy rates get low, 3-4%, homelessness tends to be high. And so if people get irritated or frustrated and say, you know, I don't know that I buy this, this is a drug problem. What I'll say is, give me a place with really high rents and low vacancies that doesn't have a problem with homelessness. And I get a blank stare and quiet because there isn't one. So is it a perfect predictor, it's not a perfect predictor, but it's pretty darn good. And it does a far better job than any of the other conventional explanations that get way more attention in the Seattle Times and LA Times as explanatory factors for homelessness.
Mike Manville 39:17
That's right. And I think, it's also with a moment's thought and the kind of explanation you do in the book, it becomes quite intuitive, which is that an individual person can start to have situations that make them increasingly desperate for a variety of reasons, a mental problem, a loss job, and so forth. And suddenly they can't pay the rent. Is there another unit where the rents more affordable? Is there a situation where they can double or triple up where they can share and things like that? And the fact is that in Michigan in West Virginia, the answer is often Yes. And in San Francisco, the answer is often no. And so that's how you end up on the street.
Gregg Colburn 39:57
Yeah. And you know, what I say to people is you have the Detroit head scratcher, I'll just say it's easier to figure it out in Detroit. If the goal if you need to get to 800 bucks a month through low wage, labor assistance, familial support, you might be able to get 800 bucks and maintain housing won't be great. Those are still issues we need to address. But it doesn't necessarily manifest itself as homelessness, if you've got to get to 1800 bucks, those systems are not going to be sufficient. And that's why we have this crisis in really expensive places.
Shane Phillips 40:26
Yeah, I think it's just important to emphasize that we're really talking about very marginalized households in one way or another. And I think one way that helped me think about this is, I looked up the share of renter households in the 30 largest cities that have incomes of $10,000, or less household incomes of $10,000, or less over the year 2021. And there's a lot of range, you know, San Jose was the smallest at 4.7%, Detroit was the largest at 19.6%. But the point is that, you know, all of these cities had 1000s, and 1000s of people who make under $10,000, or made under $10,000 in that year, at least. And again, in Detroit, if you made $10,000 in a year, you might be able to get by, you're much more likely to find some kind of housing situation and stay indoors. If you're only making $10,000 or less in Los Angeles, or Seattle or New York, you are very unlikely without you know, familial support, or some kind of assistance from the government or otherwise, to be able to afford housing. And so I think just realizing that it's maybe a relatively small share of the population, but cities have 1000s, if not millions of people, and we're just talking about very, very marginalized folks
Mike Manville 41:43
To tag on to that Shane. If you look at the 2022 demographic survey of unhoused people in Los Angeles, the 75th percentile of reported income is about $6,000. The median is zero, but a lot of folks just don't make any money, but like there's people there with incomes that in another city could conceivably have them be housed. But it's uh, you know, it's with doubling or tripling up or things like that, you can do it. And you can't do it in our expensive cities.
Gregg Colburn 42:10
And I think there's a perception that most people experiencing homelessness don't work. And in fact, the data suggests the opposite. Some recent studies in Seattle suggest that over 50% of the people in the population of people experiencing homelessness are employed. So there are people serving coffee at Starbucks living in their cars in Seattle. I was in DC this week at the National Alliance of Homelessness, and there were researchers, they're talking about interviewing people who work who are employed at homeless shelters, who live in a different homeless shelter.
Mike Manville 42:37
Unbelievable.
Gregg Colburn 42:38
So Service Workers serving people experiencing homelessness can't afford housing themselves. And they themselves are also experiencing homelessness. And so, you know, low wages and expensive places are really, really problematic.
Shane Phillips 42:50
Coming back to something we talked about earlier, I think many of our listeners have probably heard the housing market analogize, to a game of musical chairs, where, you know, essentially, when the music stops the person or people with the fewest resources have nowhere to sit nowhere to sleep. I think it's a powerful analogy, but you sort of take it a step further, or at least, if others have done it, I don't recall them doing it. But you use this analogy to also explain the difference between structural and individual risk factors or between systemic conditions and precipitating events, which I think is really valuable, I find this pretty compelling as a way of explaining the distinction between these things, and why both kinds of risk factors matter. Could you share that analogy in the connection to systemic conditions and precipitating events?
Gregg Colburn 43:37
Sure, one of the reasons why I wanted to, and I'll get to the analogy in just one moment here, Shane. It might actually be a metaphor, I need an English teacher to help me with that but whatever it is, But one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was as I was in the early stages of conceptualizing this book. One thing that I was struggling with is when we ask people experiencing homelessness, they give us very interesting and honest answers. And they're blunt, they're hard to listen to; my husband beat me up, and I ran, I drink too much. I made some poor decisions. I got in a fight with my roommate, and she kicked me out and I'm homeless. And so who am I to suggest that those aren't those people's causes of homelessness, right? We have to honor those explanations. They know their experiences far better than I do. And so what I'm wrestling with is I'm coming in saying it's the housing market. And people are saying it's domestic violence, or it's relational breakdown, or I drink too much. And so what we try to do is to honor these individual explanations while also putting them in a larger context. And so the term that we use is precipitating events, it's not to say that those explanations that people have given are false. They're true. It's their experience, but precipitating events layer on top of structure. So the analogy is musical chairs, 10 friends, 10 chairs and so you got a leader starts the music pulls one chair out, you know of nine chairs, everyone walks around the circle, the music ends, everyone scrambles and then our game Mike, which there actually wasn't like in the book, I'm not using Mike just because Mike's on the podcast today. So Mike is out and crutches and loses the game. And so I'm a big sports fan if ESPN were there, and we went up to Mike afterward and say, why did you lose the game? He said, "well, I had a bad ankle", and everyone would say "well, of course, Mike lost, he had a bad ankle". And so if we think about causation, getting back to this whole idea of how do we think about causation, the ankle injury, that vulnerability certainly probably was a cause. If we take a step back, though, and ask a different question, is why didn't like have a chair, it's because we didn't have 10 chairs. And so when we think about housing scarcity in a city like Seattle, or Los Angeles, and we see Joe on the street, who's vulnerable in some way, shape, or form, we immediately go to the fact of course, Joe's homeless, he's addicted, he's mentally ill, he's poor, et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to saying, if we had sufficient housing, Joe might have found it, it might have taken longer, it might not have been pretty as Mike hobbled over to the chair in his crutches, but he would have found it. And so what's interesting is, I have gotten more feedback, and I've given probably 100 talks around the country, more feedback on this analogy than anything else in the book. In essence, it kind of honors both of those explanations in a way that they can both be true at the same time. And therefore, do we need to deal with ankle injuries and addiction and mental health? Of course, of course, treatment is necessary. I think we have a societal obligation to do that. But we also got to keep track of do we have chairs, and do we have housing units for people to live in. And if we don't, we're going to continue to accentuate vulnerabilities and produce homelessness at really high rates.
Shane Phillips 46:24
Right. Essentially, the precipitating event is much more likely to lead to homelessness in one type of community than another.
Gregg Colburn 46:32
Exactly right.
Shane Phillips 46:33
So I want to make sure we interrogate some of these findings. And I think a good place to start, because, you know, of course, people are going to poke holes in this. And you know, they're gonna feel strongly that it's mental illness or drug addiction or weather. And so I want to make sure we address some of those concerns or things that are likely to come up. And I think a good place to start is with the data you use to test the associations between homelessness rates, and both the individual and landscape-level risk factors. In particular, I think someone who is not inclined to believe your findings would jump to this data on mental illness and drug use. So again, you found no relationship there, which is to say that cities and counties with higher reported rates of mental illness and drug abuse don't have meaningfully higher homelessness rates. But these strikes me as pretty challenging data to collect reliably and comprehensively. I think, for obvious reasons, people aren't all that motivated to share their illegal drug use with someone with a survey. And you can imagine a selection bias problem, possibly, where someone with relatively severe mental health problems is less likely to accurately report those problems because of their mental illness. You could also imagine that reported rates are more a reflection of the healthcare or other institutional capacity in the area. And the last thing I want to throw out before handing it back to you, Greg, is much like how this is a conversation about how deeply marginalized folks interact with a system built really kind of to serve people at the middle and above, it seems like the data we have available may be looking at these populations a little too generally. So like, even if rates of mental illness and drug use don't vary all that much from place to place, maybe it's the case that some places have higher rates of people with the most serious and debilitating problems who are at greatest risk of homelessness. And maybe the data we collect just doesn't quite give us the resolution to capture that level of variation. Those are just a few things that came to mind. While I was you know, thinking about this and considering questions. I'm sure these and other questions have been raised with you many times in the past. So I'm curious how you respond to them. And whether you've had reason to revisit any of these analyses over the past few years since finishing the book?
Gregg Colburn 48:43
Yeah, those are all good points. And a couple of them I hadn't even thought of Shane ao that's great. You know, I actually expected more pushback on this than we've gotten. We've gotten some, but it usually hasn't been from a scholarly perspective. It's been more based on intuition. This is what I'm seeing on the street, and how dare you suggest something that's inconsistent with my personal experience? That's really been more of the pushback. I think, on the data side, you raise some interesting points, and I've got a few rebuttals. SAMSA, which is the Substance Abuse Mental Health Administration, which is part of Health and Human Services at the Feds are the ones who maintain and gather these data. So I think the obvious threat here is drug use is because it is a survey and we're asking people about their experiences, then they may be motivated to not share the true experience. The response that I give to that one is when you look at drug overdose deaths, it maps to these data really, really well. And deaths are a clinical marker that we can keep track of and so actually just pulled up the other day, overdose deaths, and then the four biggest states were West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana, or Mississippi, one of the two, I don't remember. So the point is that even if we say we don't want to rely on personal survey, and we'll use overdose deaths as a proxy for serious unstable substance use disorders, what you're seeing is it's happening in places that also indicate high levels of serious substance use disorder. And so that is a more objective measure. It's an unfortunate and tragic measure. But it is more objective than a survey response, for example, you know, and I think the idea of the interaction between individual vulnerability and mental illness or drugs is a good point. What I would say, though, is is, you know, some people will say, "well, is this just investment bankers using cocaine." Well, you know, maybe, but I don't think that there's a lot of investment bankers using cocaine in West Virginia and Mississippi and Louisiana, where these rates are really high. In fact, rates of poverty and, and health care are terrible in the southeast. And so when you look at education, health care, and poverty, Mississippi, and Louisiana, are off the charts in terms of... on the wrong end of the scale. And so if this were just an adverse selection, meaning it's just drug use with people who are vulnerable, we should see lots of homelessness in those states, and we aren't. And so I think there's no data are perfect, and this is challenging. But when you take a few steps back and think a little bit more broadly, it's really hard to poke holes on this in the sense that there are people using drugs, and there are people experiencing mental illness in every state in the nation. And it's just the consequences of those are very different in some places than others. And we would argue that's a function of housing costs.
Mike Manville 51:12
And I think I would add to that, that you mentioned earlier, that there's a simultaneity threat of you have a drug problem, and so you become homeless, but also you become homeless, and to cope with that you develop a drug habit, to the extent that exists, it's going to bias the results in a way that actually would be less favorable to your preferred explanation, right, because the more homelessness there is, the more of that drug that's reported is going to be a simultaneity. And if you look at that, and you're still not seeing that relationship, that suggests that it's not really a place-based driver.
Gregg Colburn 51:46
That's right. That's exactly right.
Shane Phillips 51:47
So as we come near the end of this conversation, I want to explore the role of income and wealth inequality and all of this, and specifically, this idea that a rising tide actually does not lift all boats. As I think your research and the work of many other people shows, as that tide rises, we always find that there are some people who don't have a boat or whose boat is full of holes, and they end up submerged rather than lifted by a growing economy. You see this reflected in Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty" from way back in 1879, where he observes that material progress seems to produce rather than relieve poverty. And you see the same sentiment expressed in a much more recent book by Jill Khadduri and Marybeth Shinn
, "In the Midst of Plenty Homelessness and What to Do About It". So you hear that in the midst of plenty, we're having all of this homelessness. You talk about this, in your book, both the role of inequality and the limits of increased equality as a solution to this problem. And I hope you could just share some of those thoughts here.
Gregg Colburn 52:52
Yeah, what I say on the road is you could have used different framings to write this book. We could have written a book that said, homelessness is a racial justice issue, we could have written a book that homelessness is an economic inequality issue. And you could write very credible good books using that framing. We use housing as a frame because we think it's fundamentally important I study housing, and therefore this is our modest contribution to our understanding. Clearly, economic inequality is a fundamental driver of a number of social problems, United States homelessness being one of them. What's interesting, though, is in our sample inequality doesn't jump out as a huge driver, because we're focusing on big cities. And generally speaking, big cities are really unequal. San Francisco is unequal, but so is Detroit. There's inequality in Detroit, it's just from a lower base than what you have in Seattle. And so the anecdote that we use to highlight this is that homelessness thrives in missed affluence, which is just a clear indication of inequality. And so in the Great Depression, we had homelessness, because unemployment rates were 25%, around the United States, and we have Hoover fills. Now we have homelessness and camps in the shadows of Amazon's gleaming towers in Salt Lake Union in Seattle, a clear indication of massive, massive inequality. And therefore, this idea of being poor and in a wealthy place has huge consequences. So I think that is a really important point for people to understand. And it doesn't mean that I'm opposed to jobs, it doesn't mean that I'm opposed to economic growth. What I'm opposed to is economic growth and job growth that doesn't allow for income and residents continue to thrive in the communities in which they've called home. And that's where we, as communities on the west and east coast have fallen down, in my opinion,
Shane Phillips 54:29
I can tell that you've just gotten... you've been in so many of these debates and arguments and had so many people yell at you because every time you make a statement, you have to qualify like economic growth is actually good, jobs are good, I'm not saying mental illness doesn't matter. Yeah, I feel for you.
Gregg Colburn 54:48
Yes
Mike Manville 54:48
But it's important because it's it's just easy for it's easy for an argument like this one to be intentionally and unintentionally misunderstood. I mean, it's really important that Greg can seamlessly insert these caveats. I mean, this is the nature of this topic for sure.
Shane Phillips 55:05
Yeah, yeah. And I think I think you just find this across all policy, all politics. You know, a lot of people find it challenging to qualify their statements. But I think those qualifications are almost always necessary and true. And I think in most cases, they build your credibility rather than undermine it, as I think a lot of people imagine. So to close this out, like any good policy book, you have a final chapter on solutions. As part of this series of interviews we're doing for the podcast on homelessness, we're going to touch on a range of solutions from short and long term rental assistance to safe parking programs to permanent supportive housing and a whole bunch more. But given that this is our first interview in a series, and it's focused on systemic factors, I thought we could focus here on the system's approach that you outline in the last chapter, which you break down into three stages, inflow, crisis, response, and outflow. And I love for you to just share that approach. And anything else you want to say about solutions to close this out?
Gregg Colburn 56:09
Oh, sure. And I'm glad you're devoting other time to this, because you know, the solutions conversation here deserves a lot of attention. And one of the things that's been interesting for me is we spent a lot of time trying to make our arguments about the fundamental drivers here. And we've actually been more successful than I thought and persuading people. And now people have come and said, So now, what do we do? And I said, "well, we had, you know, one chapter one and a half chapters to talk about that. And our response is probably insufficient. You know, I've had governors say, give me the playbook, and said, Well, that wasn't really the purpose of the book. What I say to people is, fundamentally, we have to create access to housing for more people. And we have not done that. And so as we demonstrate in the book, The problem in our coastal cities, the reason we have a housing crisis is we have population growth, which is demand for housing. And we have really inelastic housing markets, meaning we did not construct sufficient housing as population was increasing, and prices were increasing. As a result, we ended up with really low vacancy rates, high rents, and that exact a huge cost on vulnerable households. So if we'd gone back 20 years, we would have paired job growth with housing growth, and therefore hopefully not have the same pressures in the housing market that we do right now. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, and we are where we are. So what's fun about going around the country is I can go to Kentucky and say, you are now experiencing population growth and job growth. And the governor stood up right before me and said, we are going to announce every time we announced an economic development program, we're going to announce a housing program. And I was just like, it was one of the most rewarding things that has happened from this book. And I never would have imagined it would have come out of the state of Kentucky. And so I joke that I'm like the ghost of Christmas to come from, you know, Charles Dickens book, in the sense that you whether I'm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Louisville, or Wichita, I'm going to Wichita in two weeks, don't do what we did. As you grow, make sure that you're continuing to accommodate the people who live there, and the people who are coming, and hopefully you can avoid some of these problems.
Shane Phillips 58:00
Greg, I think we're giving the same talk around the country as we talk about our books.
Gregg Colburn 58:05
It's great. Well, I know it's funny, I show up in places, and they are like, well, Shane was just here, and then I'll go somewhere else, and they're like Margo was just here. And so I'm glad that we all have similar messages, because people need to hear it from from multiple voices. But I'm glad you're you're saying the same thing.
Shane Phillips 58:19
It's also just a way of endearing yourself a little bit to crowds who might be wondering, like, why is someone from Seattle or Los Angeles coming here to talk about housing affordability? Totally, we're here to tell you, we blew it and don't make our mistakes.
Gregg Colburn 58:33
That's right. That's right. And so we know from urban economists, that typography, challenging typography and a strict regulatory environment, determine elasticity. And we're not going to change the typography of LA or San Francisco or Seattle. And so there's huge pressure on the regulatory environment. And so this is the other time when I get angry emails is when we start to talk about land use. And obviously, that's a space that you spend a lot of time on Shane, and we can't continue to have Seattle, rezone 75%, single family, we needed a denser urban environment. And that is going to require change in the built environment. And that will be a challenging transition. But we're going to make the transition because we have to. And so what I say to folks is the answer to the question of what do we do is always D, all the above. We need private developers to build a whole bunch more housing, we need to create a regulatory environment that allows them to do that. And hopefully that will be done housing, will market rate housing alone and this absolutely not. But we can use the levers of government to facilitate that, and then we can focus our other time and attention on ensuring that people can access housing, and that either means subsidizing the construction of housing, it means expanding rental assistance, either at the federal state or local level for people who need it. In the absence of that we will perpetuate this crisis. And the problem with housing in the United States is we think about it as a private good in the private housing market has served my family just fine, but it hasn't served everyone. And so what's fascinating is when we think about big infrastructure, we always talk about transit and bridges and things like that. We don't talk about how seem. So in our region, we passed $55 billion for transit, it's sorely needed way overdue. I recently had a meeting with our Governor Jay Inslee, who I have great respect for. And he was speaking to me about the importance of housing in the state of Washington. And he wanted to push for a very ambitious number, which is $4 billion. And it's interesting after I left that meeting was was reflecting on that, it's just interesting that our region talks about transit at 55 billion, and then housing, the number one issue in our state is 5 billion, we're an order of magnitude off on that. And the resources exist to do much more, but we lack imagination when it comes to housing, because we view it as such a private good, that it's really not a role for the government. And this is when people call me a socialist, and then we have get more angry emails.
And then you tell them about your background as an investment...
And I tell them, I used to work at Goldman Sachs, and there aren't a lot of socialist walking around the halls like Goldman Sachs. So the point is, is that I believe there's a role for government in ensuring that we can provide access to housing, and there's a huge role for the private market to construct the housing we need. We have millions and millions of units of a deficit in the United States. And that's not all going to be constructed by the government. And so then when you get down to the lower levels, I think that's where the other episodes you're going to have are going to talk about these important interventions that are critical in dealing with homelessness. And the cruel irony in this story is the interventions that we know work are increasingly difficult, where housing is scarce, right? So Houston has had great success in getting people out of homelessness. And part of the reason is because they had two mayors who were very focused on this, and they coordinated a response, and they deserve great respect and admiration for that. But they also had nine or 10% vacancies, there were units in which to place people. So the housing shortage that is creating the homelessness crisis in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles is also making applying these interventions at scale much more difficult, because there aren't units. When we got emergency housing vouchers in Seattle, I got a call from Seattle Housing Authority saying we can't use them. We won the lottery, we got all this money from the feds, which we've been asking for for decades. And then we couldn't use them because we don't have units. And that's true for Housing First and permanent supportive housing. And so is housing the sole solution? Absolutely not, I would never suggest it is. But fixing this without adequate housing is going to be really, really difficult.
Mike Manville 1:02:05
I mean, I think either just to go back to the point I raised earlier, which I think you're raising now, Greg is just that sometimes when you say to people, well, you know, fundamentally, the homelessness problem in LA is a housing problem. One of the things you'll hear back is like, oh, and so, you know, point at some random unhoused person and say you just want to give that person a house? And, you know, sometimes the answer to that is yes, but I think a more accurate answer is not necessarily right? Like it's entirely possible, you the skeptic, you know, you may not believe that the solution once someone has been unhoused for a long time as simply housing. That's a totally fair position that there's, you know, people arguing ferociously about that. I think what your what your book demonstrates so powerfully, is that the flow into homelessness is really driven by the housing problem. And if you don't want to get to this situation, where you have a large stock of people who don't have housing, because at that point, there are no good solutions, there's just less bad solutions, right? If you don't want to get to that point, then you want to cut off that flow. And you cut off that flow by making housing available. So you can have a situation, I think, where someone completely buys the argument in your book, and then says, I am not a Housing First person.
Gregg Colburn 1:03:24
Yep.
Mike Manville 1:03:24
Right, that that is a maybe right or wrong, but it is not an inconsistent position. And I think that's a great source of confusion, that you can acknowledge that the flow is caused by the housing market, and have deep reservations about just using housing as the solution for people who are currently suffering.
Gregg Colburn 1:03:41
Yeah, it's a great point. I certainly do hear that from folks. And I respect that opinion. The one response I have, and I've heard this from people in these exact words, and these are really blunt kind of hard words to to hear, but I don't think housing is going to help Joe, Joe's a mess. Yeah, which is a variant of what you just said, Mike. And so what I say to people is, that's fine. I understand your concern. But what's also interesting is we cut veteran homelessness in United States by 50% in 10 years, and how do we do that we provided housing. For some people was just a voucher, all they needed was a little purchasing power, and they were off to the races. Other people had serious behavioral health disorders. And we provide the housing plus supportive services. So when people push back and say, I don't know that this works, we'll say, "well, we have a fair amount of evidence to suggest that it does". Now was that costly? Yes. And why do we do it because it's good politics. It's good politics to house veterans. And so you know, leaders of both political parties, and we have the VA system, which is a huge infrastructure through which we could funnel these funds and, and resources and services. And so some of these interventions are expensive, but they have a pretty good track record of success. And the final point I'm making, I know we need to wrap up up here, is when people push back on the cost of these housing interventions, which are not insignificant. You know, what else is really expensive, untreated homelessness. That's right, now it's distributed through multiple systems health care system criminal justice ,streets and sanitation libraries, I get emails from librarians all over the country, the stress in the library system because it's become a place for people experiencing homelessness to hang out. So the point is, is like we're going to pay one way or the other, I'd much rather pay and get people housed, and have them be healthy than to let these systems incur huge, huge costs.
Mike Manville 1:05:20
Yeah, and some of those costs are avoidance. I don't walk down the street, I don't ride the bus, you know, it's a huge cost.
Gregg Colburn 1:05:27
And this conference doesn't go to Seattle or San Francisco anymore. There's an economic consequence of this. And in fact, I actually just read a paper, a job market paper, for an economist who did a study of real estate transaction values near encampments in Los Angeles and found a multibillion dollar effect, you know, in the vicinity of encampments. And suggesting that, that is a tax, and you could pay a smaller tax that would fund a lot of housing. And so the point is, is that there are costs throughout these systems that are masked to a certain extent. And so we just hold up the cost of housing and say, well look at this, and we ignore these other embedded costs.
Shane Phillips 1:06:00
I'm gonna have to close this out here. I literally have the housekeeper knocking on the door, kicking me out of my late checkout from the hotel room. So thank you so much, Greg. I really appreciate your time and such a clear explanation all this. Great.
Gregg Colburn 1:06:14
Thanks. And thanks, Mike.
Shane Phillips 1:06:19
You can read more about Greg's work on our website lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. Mike and I are on Twitter, and you can find the UCLA Lewis Center on the various socials. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks with part two of Pathways Home.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai