Too Late for a Spoiler Alert: A Review of Homelessness is a Housing Problem

This originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right

Thanks to Common Dreams for agreeing to publish this review. At the time of this writing, it has not yet been posted. But it should be up on their site within the next few days.

Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern would make lousy mystery writers, but they have gifted us with an important new book about housing. With zero effort at deception, they happily give away their thesis with the book title: Homelessness is a Housing Problem.

Colburn is a housing policy professor at the University of Washington and Aldern is a Seattle-based data scientist. They analyze the cause of homelessness by way of region-by-region comparisons, which quickly refute the most common misconceptions. Are the widely varying rates of homelessness across the nation attributable to differences in weather, government benefits, or policing of street living? The data say no. In fact, unhoused persons rarely move in the search of a more hospitable climate of any kind, with the vast majority living in the same communities where they were last housed.   

What about the particularly persistent argument that mental illness and addiction create spikes in homeless populations? It is a predictable conclusion, since the chronically unsheltered are more likely to endure these struggles. Although they don’t represent the majority of the unhoused, these chronically unhoused people are both most visible to the public and the population most often studied by governments and researchers.

But, no again. Colburn and Aldern point out that Hawaii, for example, has a huge unsheltered population but relatively lower rates of mental illness and addiction than places like West Virginia, where the homeless population is far smaller. The historical record refutes this hypothesis, too: before the 1980’s the U.S. had plenty of challenges with poverty, mental illness, and addiction—but very little homelessness.

So, if not addiction, mental health, weather, etc., what has triggered the crisis? Simply put, it’s the cost of housing. “Housing market conditions explain why Seattle has four times the per capita homelessness of Cincinnati,” Colburn and Aldern write. “Housing market conditions explain why high-poverty cities like Detroit and Cleveland have low rates of homelessness.”

Underlying vulnerabilities like mental illness, addiction, low wages, and disability certainly can cause individuals and households to struggle. But the factor determining whether that struggle ends up on the street is usually the cost of maintaining a roof overhead.  “For a highly impoverished household, it is likely easier to access housing in Detroit or St. Louis, where media rents are between $600 and $800 per month, than in San Francisco and Santa Clara County, where costs are three to four times higher,” Colburn and Aldren point out.

Colburn and Aldern’s book is a manifesto for the Housing First approach, which prioritizes permanent housing before addressing personal struggles. “The evidence is clear that attempting to resolve one’s serious mental illness or substance use conditions in isolation fails to resolve one’s homelessness crisis,” they write. “Providing housing as a human right, not as a good or a service available to those who can afford it, is the key.”

As for solutions, Colburn and Aldern repeat the widespread calls for policies that would make market-rate housing more affordable. Those include lifting zoning bans against multi-family housing and easing regulations that make housing construction needlessly difficult and expensive. But let’s not forget our eviction court clients and the millions of others whose low-wage or disability-check incomes don’t allow them to consistently afford even the lowest rung of market-rate rent. So I am grateful that Colburn and Aldern don’t limit their analysis to market conditions. Instead, they emphasize several times that for-profit housing will never provide the answer for an entire community’s housing needs.

“The goal here ought to be creating a stock of decommodified housing that resides outside the private market,” they write. They rightly insist that this stock can be developed through more progressive taxation and a more just use of the billions our government now spends subsidizing high-income homeowners and landlords. “Critically, we argue for a paradigm shift in how we think about housing. Rather than conceptualizing housing as solely a private good—one procured through market transactions—housing must be de-commodified. Shelter is fundamental to human survival and demands a different treatment than iPhones.” 

Housing Must be Decommodified would have been a great unsubtle book title, too. But the one Colburn and Aldern chose, and the book behind it, work just fine.

I had the privilege of listening to Gregg Colburn speak to a large crowd in Indianapolis last month. He is a gifted presenter who is no doubt terrific in a classroom. You can watch him present the book’s thesis and findings in this 17-minute video here.

Watch Gregg’s full Indianapolis presentation here.