“Homelessness is a Housing Problem”: When cities build more housing, homelessness goes down

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Maybe you’ve seen the headlines: “Affordable housing in California now routinely tops $1 million per apartment to build” (that’s up a few hundred thousand from 2017, when we wrote “L.A. digs a hole more slowly than economics fills it back in: The Proposition HHH Facilities Program RFP“). At a million dollars a unit, not many units will be built, and California will continue to suffer from high housing costs in general and high levels of homelessness. The topic is, unfortunately, timely; I’ve been reading a book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, which covers what you’d expect based on the title. Yet there’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America. Click here to continue reading.