Homelessness Is a Housing Problem

How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns

By: Gregg Colburn, Clayton Page Aldern

Narrated by: Adam Verner

In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores United States cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

©2022 Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern (P)2023 Tantor

Good explanation

Best explanation I have read so far of homelessness:
It is high in areas which have a *low rental vacancy rate* - below 4%. Homelessness in areas with rates over 5% have lower homelessness.
It’s that simple.

Other factors (such as levels of addiction) do not explain homelessness variations from geographical area to geographical area - only the percentage of rental units which are vacant.
Simple. But not simple to fix.

Gives the extremely successful program to end veteran homelessness, led from the federal level, as a template for what can be achieved if the country wants to.

A must listen

Everyone and anyone who cares about homelessness, poverty, equality, economics should listen to this audiobook.

NO PDF! NO CHARTS!

it's a very interesting and thoughtful book but relies on data so it is unconscionable not to include links to charts that are often referred to. this is the first audible book that refers to charts that HASN'T included such an option. Shame on the publisher.

This should be required reading for every single person in the country.

I deal with NIMBYism almost every single day. We need more studies and mathematical models along the lines of this book, and the work of Jeffrey West the author of Scale, and we should be able to utilize these mathematical models to make policy decisions as opposed to allowing unfounded emotional reactions to drive policy.

Something we are ignoring currently in this discussion is the transformation of our cities from being a place from which to escape, which began in the 1850s, as very thoroughly outlined in Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, to our cities, becoming the social hub of young single people, and or single people in general.

Some thing we are going to have to grapple with which is going to be incredibly unpleasant is whether or not, we wish to actually be neighbors with the chronically, poor, or people on societies’s fringe?

One way to think about it is if you are living downtown do you want someone living next-door to you in a subsidized unit to be in any of the categories most associated with chronic homelessness?

As we make policy, we tend to have the attitudes that people should be willing to live next-door to the less privileged but then, on an individual basis, we make the decision to choose the single-family detached house on the tree line street for our personal individual residence.

At the ULI for meeting in Dallas last year, I heard a New York developer suggest that taking on the task of housing the chronically at risk population can become incredibly difficult. She said in one of their buildings they have a woman who has pulled a knife on other residents who are paying top of the market rent, and in in one case, she, the at risk woman, actually stabbed her neighbor, while she was in a delusional, state.

The developer then went on to say if every single developer in the nation was required to include subsidize affordable units than this would spread the at risk population across the entire country.

I thought she made an interesting point, and then I tried to imagine how on earth this could ever be fashioned into housing policy and I also began to imagine all the different ways developers would do everything in their power to game the system.

The most important thing in in terms of creating successful market rate housing is asking the question. What do women want? 100% of the time the answer is safe and clean. That’s simply means that the location must feel clean and safe, and the building itself must feel clean and safe in addition to that the pedestrian pathway from the residence to the employment center, assuming walkability in an urban, setting, the entire route must feel safe and clean.

Housing the homeless should be our great priority, so that we do not have unkempt intimidating and unclean, unhoused people in our cities and along our pedestrian pathways. I’m not talking about hiding the homeless, but I’m also not talking about not hiding the homeless I’m saying we need to house everyone and more importantly we need to give them something to do and somewhere to be so they are not in the public spaces intimidating the very people, we have worked so diligently over the past 20 years to attract back into living in the core of our nations cities.

if we choose to ignore this issue, we will continue to see our young talent move to suburban cities with tiny historic centers, such as college towns, in order to avoid the seemingly nonstop encounters with the chronically homeless.

I am not suggesting that we hide the homeless, but I am suggesting that if young women perceive the public spaces of our cities, as being occupied by the characters that they find intimidating, we are going to see the past gains of urban revitalization slowly come to a halt.

I believe there are taxation policies which could incentivize developers to include affordable housing. If projects are large enough to accommodate around 5 to 10% of the units for extremely low income residence. It’s always a question of math, and there’s very little trust between policymakers and the private sector, when it comes to agreeing on what is a reasonable rate of return on capital.

I could imagine a city wide policy involving tax increment financing where a municipality says, we will give you $25,000 per unit (in a small Midwestern city for example)and you have to make 5% of the units available for section 8 vouchers. If you don’t want the tax increment financing you wouldn’t have to be subject to the section 8 requirement.

I don’t know if this would be easy to administer and easy to keep records as a property owner in order to maintain compliance, but it might be a means of increasing the supply of housing units. I’m sure there’s a way this could be structured for the remodel of existing buildings as well.

You might also be able to stack additional entitlements in the form of bi-rite zoning if you would agree to make an additional 5% of the units available for section 8 vouchers.

I could see a federal tool like that being very effective in an anti-affordable housing jurisdiction where you simply could bypass Nimbyism by agreeing to accept section 8 vouchers.

It would really be great if a policy like that could be put together in a rulemaking provision, as opposed to a legislative provision, because there seems to be no chance that any legislator, no matter what political party they belong to would be willing to tell their constituents back home that they no longer have the ability to block unwanted, multi family developments near their homes.

At a conference I attended at the Brookings Institute way back in 2003. I learned that density always increases property values. The presenter said that there has never been a single study that shows otherwise. The claims that density and or multi family development decreases property values is always a false claim 100% of the time. The explanation for this fact has to do with density bringing services such as food retail and other amenities and there is no doubt that urban property has a higher taxation rate based on square-foot of land than just about any other comparable suburban property.

But what people mean when they say decreasing property values, I believe they are saying they no longer want to live at this location because they moved out to the suburban fringe in order to not see someone who is struggling.

We have been doing this, again since the 1850s, the escape from the city, from its aesthetic, from its perceived danger are all contributing factors to our collective willingness to create housing for the vulnerable population.

We can’t solve this problem by saying people need to change their attitudes, we have to have a realistic discussion about who the city belongs to at various times of day and what do we want that experience to be like for those citizens.

If we collectively decide to house, those who would otherwise be homeless and stop there without addressing their other fundamental human needs, forcing them back onto the street as panhandlers or vagrants of some sort, we are making the decision to abandon the progress of the past 20 years and the efforts to revitalize our urban centers.

Read this book, as well as Scale, & Crabgrass Frontier & Walkable Cities & The Death and Life of Great American Cities & Happy City & Nature, Fix & Last Child in the Woods, & Confessions of a Recovering Engineer & everything written by Nasim Taleb, as well as many other books on the subject of cities, place making and housing policy

Then get involved there is almost no one who is trying to increase the housing supply anywhere other than people working in the home building industry or a tiny group in the nonprofit sector, trying to house the chronically homeless. The overwhelming majority of people are actively trying to make this problem worse, don’t be one of them.



housing when we are thinking about success in market rate is what do women want

Informative

A great read on a crucial issue that will not be improving anytime soon. Very informative. Read to understand the complexities involved with housing and the problems it can cause if we don’t rectify them.

A work of bad fiction

A professor with opinions that they try to pass as facts. I expected more from this book. Very left versus right. I would not waste your money.