Courtesy of Gregg Colburn
On the evening of Feb. 10, students, faculty, staff and visitors gathered in the Council Chambers for the Economics Department’s annual Mattersdorf-Steinhardt lecture. This year’s guest speaker, Gregg Colburn, is an associate professor of real estate at the University of Washington where he teaches courses on housing, urban economics and finance. His 2022 book, titled “Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns,” was co-authored with data journalist Clayton Page Aldern and addresses the competing narratives on the homelessness crisis in many major U.S. cities.
Colburn walked the crowd through his and Aldern’s research. As the title suggests, Colburn and Aldern argue that the common causal explanations for homelessness — including mental illness and drug addiction — are insufficient to understand the scope and severity of the crisis. These causes, Colburn explained, are at the individual level, and are thus much more easily observed in cities like Portland with high levels of unsheltered homelessness.
“It’s very easy to draw a causal relationship between Joe on the street with a needle next to him and homelessness,” Colburn said. “That then shapes our understanding and then pushes the public narrative in that direction.”
Individual-level causes have both evidentiary basis and practical implications for policy makers and social workers. What these causes cannot slove, Colburn argues, is a city-level explanation.
Homelessness is a distinctly urban problem, said Colburn, with the highest prevalence occurring in some of the nation’s largest cities. However, not every major U.S. city has a homelessness crisis. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles have famously large homeless populations, as do New York and Boston. But Chicago, relative to its population size, does not. Neither do Phoenix, Miami, Cleveland or San Antonio. In fact, the rate of homelessness in Seattle is five times that of the much larger Chicago.
“Tight housing markets, places where housing is expensive and scarce, accentuate individual vulnerabilities,” Colburn said. “Individual vulnerability interacts with the housing market to produce lots of homelessness. That’s the thesis.”
To many readers, that argument is a hard sell. Mental illness, drug addiction and poverty seem to be the obvious causal factors — Colburn says any witness to unsheltered homelessness in Portland, New York or Los Angeles will tell you as much.
“This is when people’s blood pressure starts to rise,” Colburn joked.
One by one, Colburn addressed the commonly held notions of causal factors of homelessness. Using bivariate statistical graphs from his book, Colburn stated that, when plotted against rates of homelessness cities — or counties for some of the datasets — with more poverty see less homelessness. The data indicated that mental illness, weather patterns and substance abuse were also weak explanations for homelessness disparities between counties and cities. The cities with the highest rates of homelessness are not disproportionately poor, mentally ill or drug addicted, even if those factors are present at the individual level.
“There are people, of course, experiencing mental illness in Washington, Oregon and California, but it’s not disproportionate to Kansas and Arkansas and Louisiana,” Colburn said. “So we can’t blame the problem in our West Coast states on disproportionate rates of mental illness.”
The same logic, Colburn explained, follows with substance abuse. Addiction can be both a cause for and result of homelessness at the individual level. Colburn referenced a study conducted by his colleague, Professor Margot Kushel at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, who interviewed people experiencing homelessness in California about their personal drug use. Individuals who reported using methamphetamines, the most commonly used drug among those surveyed, listed two primary reasons for their use of the drug.
“One is it suppresses my appetite, and I can’t find food and going through the day hungry sucks. The second thing it does is it keeps me awake. When I go to sleep, bad things happen. I get victimized, my stuff gets stolen,” Colburn said, paraphrasing interview responses.
Still, this explanation does not explain why some places have issues with substance abuse but not high rates of homelessness.
“Highest overdose death rates in the United States are West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana,” he said. “If drug use and abuse were fundamentally the driver of this crisis, we should see massive rates of homelessness in those states, and we don’t.”
Though it exacerbates housing insecurity on the individual level, poverty similarly does not disproportionately affect rates of homelessness, Colburn noted. The negative correlation tells a different story entirely — where poverty is common, inequality is less severe and stable housing is more accessible to the poorest residents.
“The point here is not that poverty doesn’t matter. The point is that being poor in a rich place has really, really big consequences. It’s no picnic in Detroit, but it’s a real big problem in San Francisco. Right? If you’re poor and you need to get to $700 a month in rent in Detroit, you might be able to figure it out through low-wage labor, public assistance, familial support. If you’ve got to get to $2,200 in San Francisco, no shot. So we can’t blame poverty for regional variation in rates of homelessness,” he said.
After countering other arguments, Colburn then focused on the explanation for homelessness at the core of his book — an inadequate supply of housing.
“If the price of housing in Portland goes up ten times tonight, what happens to the supply of housing in Portland next week? Nothing. Zero. Nada. There’s literally no change,” Colburn said. “So housing generally is not a terribly elastic good, because it takes a long time to build housing. I need land, I need permits, I need financing, I need labor, materials.”
Colburn offered an analogy in the form of the game of musical chairs, in which 10 people circle and then try to claim one of nine chairs. The losing player, Mike, was on crutches. Mike might blame his chairlessness on his bad ankle, and most people would probably agree.
“But if we ask a different question, which is, ‘Why didn’t Mike have a chair?’ It’s because we didn’t have 10 chairs. Had we had 10 chairs, Mike would have found a chair. It might have taken him longer, it might not have been pretty, but he would have hobbled his way to a chair,” he said.
Despite his research, Colburn has continuously struggled to convince reporters, legislators and an agitated public that governments should spend even more money on often expensive policy solutions.
“Because our response has been woefully inadequate, the progress we’ve made is overwhelmed by the scale of the problem,” Colburn said. “You have a $50 billion problem, you threw a billion dollars at it and it didn’t go away. It’s not the billion’s fault.”
Without addressing the housing shortage, Colburn argues, there is no hope of solving the homelessness crisis. However, he is confident that change is still possible.
“The path is right in front of us. We have abundant evidence. We could fill this room with it demonstrating that when we prioritize housing and investments, we can end and radically reduce homelessness,” Colburn said.
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