Understanding the root causes
of homelessness is really important
if we're going to address this crisis.
Meet Gregg Colburn.
He's an assistant professor at the University of Washington.
And this is Q&A,
the show where we look for answers
to some of the biggest questions in our region.
Having interviewed a lot of people experiencing
homelessness, I can tell you each
story is unique, it's tragic, and different factors
come together, they interact to produce an outcome.
The research on homelessness
is very clear that some individual factors
like poverty, that drug use or addiction, mental illness,
increase the risk of homelessness.
There's no doubt about that.
The question is, are these factors root
causes of homelessness in our region?
The reality is, is the consequences
of those conditions in Seattle are different than elsewhere.
And so the example that I like to use
is West Virginia,
which is the home of the opioid epidemic in the United States.
And so if opioid addiction, which is a
which is a tragic circumstance,
if that's a driver of homelessness,
we should see a lot of homelessness in West Virginia.
But in fact, we don't.
So the consequences of addiction
in West Virginia are very different
than they are in Seattle.
Gregg co-wrote this book.
Homelessness is a housing problem.
The book compares
rates of homelessness
in different places around the country
to better understand the root causes of homelessness.
So on this chart and this visual, what you'll see
is New York and Boston and Washington, D.C.
are on the high end.
And then Chicago, for example, is on the low end.
And there's about a 5 to 1
ratio in per capita rates of homelessness.
When we move to counties, the numbers are lower
because we're including the suburban locations.
But what's interesting is that relationship
between high and low still holds at about 5 to 1.
Why do some places like L.A.
and Seattle
have five times the per capita rates of homelessness
compared with places like Chicago and Cleveland?
What is it about Seattle
that produces this result when compared to other cities
around the country that don't have anywhere near
the per capita rates of homelessness that we do?
To answer this question,
Greg used a statistical measure called R squared.
R squared helps to analyze how the differences in one variable
can explain the differences in another variable.
For example,
does the amount of poverty in a community predict
the amount of homelessness in that community?
Do high rates of drug use in a community
also indicate high rates of homelessness?
Let's take a look at some of his findings.
So what we will see in this graph is a relationship
between poverty rates and rates of homelessness.
Where poverty rates are really high.
Homelessness tends to be quite low.
And so the point here is,
is that Seattle
doesn't have a homelessness problem
because we have more people experiencing poverty.
In fact, we're a relatively low poverty community.
Detroit, for example,
is the most impoverished city in the country.
There at the far right end of this graphic,
but they have some of the lowest rates of homelessness.
And if poverty really
were the root cause of this at a community level,
Detroit should have a huge homelessness problem.
But in fact, they don't.
So we need to keep looking for a better explanation.
Do places with more drug use
or mental illness have more homelessness?
The next two categories we look at
are actually calculated at the state level.
So these are state
per capita rates of homelessness relative to illicit drug use
and mental illness.
So what we see is that
there is some variation in rates of mental illness
and drug use in states around the country,
but it doesn't correlate at all with rates of homelessness.
And so the places with higher rates of mental illness and drug
use aren't places where homelessness is higher.
Do places with good weather have more homelessness?
People frequently
tell me that we have a problem here
because the weather is moderate
and in Chicago it's cold and therefore
we have homelessness here.
When you plot weather and homelessness,
what you see is there's actually no relationship.
Do welfare benefits encourage homelessness?
A second local contextual factor that people frequently
blame for homelessness is a generous services.
They're stingy states. They're generous states.
But we don't see disproportionate
homelessness in places that are generous.
Are unhoused people moving to King County?
People say, well, there's a mobility story here,
that people are moving here because of
weather, benefits, etc.
And so what we look at is low income migration.
There are people below the
poverty line moving to Seattle, just as there are in all cities
in the United States.
But there's not disproportionate movement
to places with high rates of homelessness.
What role does political party leadership play in homelessness?
Well, I've heard a lot of people say
that it's left leaning or democratic policies
that are to blame.
But what's interesting is we looked at all
the cities in our sample,
which is 30 cities across the United States.
And in all of those data points, 85% of those years,
a Democrat was in charge.
And so if Democratic policies are to blame,
how do we then
explain the huge variation between Chicago and Cleveland,
which are Democratic strongholds but have very low rates of
homelessness, and New York, Boston,
Seattle, San Francisco, which are also blue.
Do places with higher rents have more homelessness?
We then turn to housing
market characteristics and this is where we start
to see some pretty compelling statistical evidence
of explanatory power between one of these variables
and rates of homelessness.
And so what we see is when you plot median rents
in places that are expensive, homelessness is high
and in places that are cheap, homelessness is low.
And we look at vacancy rates, again, a similar story.
And again,
it's more statistically powerful than other explanations.
When vacancy rates are low or housing is not available,
we see much higher rates of homelessness and vice versa.
Ultimately, Chicago has relatively high vacancy rates
and is far more affordable than Seattle.
And it also explains
the very odd situation of Detroit,
which has the highest rate of poverty in the country,
but has very, very low rates of homelessness
because housing is abundant.
In fact, they're tearing down housing in Detroit
because of the huge population losses that they've experienced.
And so that abundant and relatively cheap housing
really mitigates
the problem of homelessness in those communities.
If a lack of affordable housing is driving homelessness.
What are the obstacles to building
more housing in our region?
One is topography,
and so places with mountains and water, it tends to be less
elastic, meaning it's harder to build in response
because you run into mountains or water.
The second issue
is the regulatory environment, which you're trying to
construct housing.
So some places it's very easy to build.
It's easy to get a permit.
The zoning accommodates housing of all types.
And in other places, it's very difficult.
So imagine ten friends in a circle with ten chairs.
They all stand up.
A leader starts playing music, they walk around in a circle.
The leader takes one chair out.
And in this case, Mike has an ankle injury
and was on crutches
and given his impairment, was unable to move quickly
and therefore lost the game was left
without a chair when the music stopped.
And so if we were to interview
Mike at the end of the game and say, Mike,
why do you think you lost the game? What would you say?
He'd say, Well, I had a bad ankle,
but if we take a step back and really think critically,
what was the cause of Mike's chairlessness,
was the fact that we didn't have enough chairs.
And that's really an analogy for what's going on in Seattle
right now, in the sense that ankle injuries
or other vulnerabilities don't cause homelessness.
But they do identify the people
who are most likely to experience homelessness
in a constrained housing market like Seattle.
I would say that
there's one real silver
lining in the homelessness story,
and that is the story of veterans homelessness.
Veterans homelessness has fallen by 50%
over the last decade, which is a real success story.
And so people say, well, how did we do it?
And the answer is that we gave them housing.
And the question is, will we then provide similar responses
to a broader community of people who need access to housing?
And so that's really the
ray of positive light in an otherwise somewhat dismal story.
And I think if we can replicate that policy response
a little more broadly,
hopefully we can make a similar dent in this problem,
both here in King County and around the country.