The Economic Impact of Homelessness in Missoula

Homelessness has been at the center of local, regional and national debate in recent years, with tensions rising between residents, advocates, business owners and politicians. 

This week, local economist Bryce Ward joined the Missoula County commissioners to discuss the findings of his most recent report, “Economic Impact of Homelessness in Missoula.” In this episode, they answer questions like “how does Missoula’s homeless population compare to other communities in Montana?” and “what does homelessness look like in rural areas?” Bryce also addresses common myths about the demographics of homelessness, plus the surprising link between our social lives and our personal stability. 

Reports and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Economic Impact of Homelessness in Missoula, 2024
• Housing Solutions Fund, administered by United Way of Missoula County
• Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness in California, 2023
• American Time Use Survey data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics

 
Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:10] Welcome back to the agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners. I'm Josh Slotnick, and I'm here with my friends and fellow commissioners Dave Strohmaier and Juanita Vero. And today we have a very special guest, Bryce Ward, who's an economist. Bryce recently published a report called The Economic Impact of Homelessness in Missoula that we are going to talk about today. So thanks a ton for joining us, Bryce.

Bryce Ward: [00:00:30] Happy to be here.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:31] Yeah. Thanks, Bryce. And I guess before we jump into the the meat of it, and I guess this is Meade. Also, tell us a little bit about your background and what areas you focus on, research wise or otherwise.

Juanita Vero: [00:00:43] Does that sound like Justin Angle?

Bryce Ward: [00:00:46] No. You got to say like, uh, who? Where? Where'd your parents where are your parents? Where'd you grow up, and where's your parents?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:52] Okay, you can hit on that, too, if you want.

Bryce Ward: [00:00:53] Uh, well, I grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon. Where? The homeless. Homeless? Yeah, exactly. And my dad was in real estate. My mom did a variety of jobs, but ultimately.

Juanita Vero: [00:01:04] When he said he was in real estate, what does that mean? I mean, he started.

Bryce Ward: [00:01:06] Off literally building houses, and then he started designing and building houses. And then eventually he just kind of moved into building office buildings and houses and developing subdivisions, you know, kind of does all of that. Even now, as a 78 year old.

Juanita Vero: [00:01:21] Still in Grants Pass>

Bryce Ward: [00:01:22] Still in Grants Pass.

Juanita Vero: [00:01:23] So how did you get to Missoula?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:01:24] Yeah. At some point you came....?

Bryce Ward: [00:01:25] I married a missoulian.

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:26] Ah. Good choice.

Bryce Ward: [00:01:28] You know, and we lived in Oregon for a while and for six years. She basically complained about Portland. Uh, basically it was every day. It was like something was wrong with Portland, or. When are we moving to Missoula? 

Juanita Vero: [00:01:41] What era was this?

Bryce Ward: [00:01:42] This was 2008 to 2014. I moved. Yeah. So the end of 2013 is when she finally won. So then I came here, we got the job at the university that I started here at. Yeah. Oh, we.

Juanita Vero: [00:01:53] We were like clawing our way out of the recession then, right?

Bryce Ward: [00:01:56] Yeah. Everybody was crawling their way out of the recession. Um, you know, and, uh. Yeah. So then I came and I took a job at the Bureau of Business and Economic Research and still did a little of my own stuff on the side. And now I'm ten years in. I'm very. I'm very much a happy Montanan. And Missoulians.

Juanita Vero: [00:02:11] How'd you get interested in this issue of homelessness?

Bryce Ward: [00:02:14] Okay. So, you know, I mean, as an economist, I kind of put myself into a category as a regional economist. Right? And basically that's just a way of cheating because it means that anything applies because everything is part of a regional economy. Right? So I'm interested in labor markets, I'm interested in housing markets, I'm interested in social networks and social capital. I'm interested in tax policy, health care, all of those things. So as a regional economist, I can say I'm a regional economist and then go do all of those things. And obviously homelessness is it touches on all of that. Right? You know, I think as we'll talk about right. It's it is the intersection of labor markets, housing markets, the safety net, you know, and all of those things put together. And then, you know, obviously just the presence of homelessness, it matters. It matters for the community. And that's where, you know, I think where a lot of this report came from is Grant Chiara MEP called me up and was like, hey, would you be interested in doing something on homelessness? And I was like, yeah, because I would like to know more as well. I don't come with this as a completely naive. I read lots of journal articles on homelessness because they come across reached the level of something that reaches me. But like, if you'd asked me six months ago, how big is Missoula's homeless population? Has it changed over time? What are all of the ins and outs of homeless policy? I could not have answered that in a great deal. So I was like, sure, I'll spend two months reading all of the literature and then I'll digest it and give you a report.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:34] So we helped fund that. Yeah, yeah. So it's really important to us. So how big a deal is homelessness in Missoula, in the city and in the county? How big a problem is this.

Bryce Ward: [00:03:42] Missoula's rate of homelessness is? It's pretty typical. It's pretty typical for other communities in Montana. It's pretty typical for the nation. Measuring homelessness is a problem, right? You know who counts and how do we even find them and count them up? So it tends to be higher in places where you have services, because the easiest people to count are those that are in shelters. When I say that Missoula's rates are slightly higher than maybe the national average, well, we think that we're missing a lot of the rural homeless because nobody bothers to count them. Most of the counting is done literally by the organizations that are providing services. Once I adjust for that, undercounting Missoula is pretty typical. You know, we have like 0.3% of our population when we do the point in time count, which is where we try and make an effort on a particular day in January to count everybody up.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:31] So how many people is that for?

Bryce Ward: [00:04:34] That's like 350.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:35] Is that point in time for the county or just the.

Bryce Ward: [00:04:37] City that's, you know, everywhere we count, right. And that's the thing, right? Do I think that people drive up to Condon to count homelessness? No, I don't, which is why I don't trust statewide numbers, because the point in time count is literally it is something that the continuum of care have to do, which is the continuum of care is the local touch point for all federal homelessness funding. Right? As a condition of receiving that money, you have to do the point in time. In Montana, we have one for the whole state, right? So they then work together. Right. And who's in that? Well, it's the POV, right. And it's. J Street. Yeah. Or. Yeah. And it's, you know, in Butte, it's the rescue mission and it's the Hrdc in Bozeman, it's Riverstone in Billings, in Billings. And, you know, on the day when the point in time comes, they then obviously the easy thing go into your shelters, count up all the people. They're sheltered homeless. Great. That number we can believe. But then they are then tasked they kind of put little teams together, volunteers, and they send them out to comb the streets looking for home. And they have to. There's rules like when do you approach somebody or not? Like, you know, because you're not supposed to do something dangerous. Do they have to answer? You know, so then the unsheltered counting part is really hard. It can fluctuate a lot year to year depending on who did the count that year. Billings is notorious for that. Billings is numbers tend to go like this. Missoula's numbers tend to be pretty consistent.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:56] So one Bryce, one thing that we hear time and time again is this when it comes to services to address houselessness or homelessness, build it and they will come. The implication being that by our attempts to address the problem, it's actually deepening the problem or challenge. You've mentioned that we're not all that atypical from other communities across Montana, maybe a similar nature across the West. How do you hold and address that sort of question?

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:25] Add something to that. It's all part of the same question. So going in the same direction had wondered about this. Given that there are plenty of homeless people in pretty much every major population center, if it wasn't that services are bringing homeless people to population centers, it's that services happen in population centers because there are folks there who are social workers, etc. and also there are homeless people in population centers because homeless folks can live off of what housed people create in their wake. We have restaurants and dumpsters and green spaces attached to bathrooms, the sorts of accidental amenities. If you're a homeless person that you would not find in a place that was a town of 600, there aren't restaurants. There aren't courthouses that are open with bathrooms or a transfer station that has bathrooms.

Bryce Ward: [00:07:10] Yeah. So I mean, the there's two parts to this. There's the migration component, right? Which is how much do people experiencing homelessness move around, particularly in response to the availability of services. And then the other argument that gets brought up in that same general space is what an economist calls moral hazard. So when moral hazard is basically when somebody who would otherwise not be homeless remains or becomes homeless because they feel like they can be supported by the services. So I'm going to put those together and we'll just address them both at the same time. Do people migrate for services to some degree? Yeah. It's not big. The biggest types of migration that we see are. So the general rule of thumb that comes across in most of the studies you look at, it's kind of roughly 75% of people experiencing homelessness in a community were last housed in that community.

Juanita Vero: [00:08:00] The word migration can be problematic. Yeah. So when you're saying migration, where from where to where.

Bryce Ward: [00:08:05] Yeah. So then then the next roughly 15% that is from within the same state. And usually what that is is something that Missoulians will be very familiar with, which is yeah, I'm in a rural part of the county or a rural part of Ravalli County or Lake County or Mineral County where there are no services. And yeah, I will migrate to Missoula just like somebody migrates to Missoula because they had a heart attack, or they want to come to Costco. We're the urban hub of the region, so we have the services that literally don't exist in some of these other places. So, you know, you that kind of what I'll call intra regional migration certainly happens. It's not typically that large, because there's not a lot of people in the rural areas that are, you know, how about the.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:49] Difficulty of migrating or the difficulty of if you're not if you don't have a car, it's quite difficult.

Bryce Ward: [00:08:54] Exactly. Right. Certainly. You know, you can imagine that some people will drive here because typically the progression of homelessness, if it's available, you start okay, you lose your house. The first thing you try and do is couch surf. I'll talk about doubled up at some point, but that only lasts as long as you can maintain the relationships to keep it going. Then if you have a vehicle, it's car based, you know, and one of the great challenges for people, obviously if you're homeless, yeah, having a car is great because it's a layer of protection. I can lock my stuff in there. It's not completely exposed to the elements, all that kind of stuff. But I have to park it somewhere and I will accumulate parking tickets once it gets towed. I'm done. But if I have a car, I can. And I became homeless in Seeley Lake. Yeah, I might drive to Missoula and I'll try to keep it around. The research suggests it's very difficult for people to maintain access to their vehicle for a long time while homeless.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:40] When you say long time, what do you mean what time frame? You know about.

Bryce Ward: [00:09:43] The data that I'm talking about comes from California. I mean, it's months. You can really only make it months before it gets ticketed and towed and you're done. And a lot of communities, that's because it's targeted, right? They're trying to make it difficult for you to park your car somewhere if you're obviously living in it. You know, some people can make it for longer, but it's keeping gas in the car so that you can move it around to avoid the parking restrictions, you know, to avoid getting it towed and, you know, kind of stay out of people's way. It's hard. But back to the migration question. So yeah, there is migration. Intra. Regionally, it is true that people who are homeless are more likely to move between states. So in one study.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:18] We now the final 10%.

Josh Slotnick: [00:10:20] Final 10%. Okay, okay. And more likely than than.

Bryce Ward: [00:10:23] You know, say a low income housed person. Okay. Right. So the study that was done, it only has sheltered homeless people because unsheltered homeless people don't make it into the American Community Survey, which we have data on. They ask one of the questions in the American Community Survey is, where did you live last year? And so when they find people in shelters and they give them the American Community Survey, 9% lived in a different state last year. Whereas for other low income people, it's more like 3 or 4. So it is higher. [00:10:48] Now. It's what's true about that population, though, is frequently they're returning to where they're from. Because if you look at birthplace, people in shelters are actually more likely to live in their birth state than the general population. So what that tells us and anecdotes confirm, is that a lot of long distance migration of homeless populations is return migration to places where they think they can access support. [00:11:13]

Juanita Vero: [00:11:13]  [00:11:13]It's not seen a billboard in Tennessee and saying, I'm coming to Missoula. [00:11:17]

Bryce Ward: [00:11:17] Look, there's always been. The US has had long history of transient homelessness, right? There are people who love life on the road. I mean, I.

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:25] Just want to fall back on the difficulty, though. There was a time when people there was a culture of riding the rails. You can't do that now. I mean, the chain link fence and that's guarded. That's a cordoned off area, and we very rarely see people hitchhiking compared to 20 years ago, you know.

Bryce Ward: [00:11:40] Yeah. So it becomes it is harder, you know, bus ticket. You know, there is still some hitchhiking. There is still some riding of rails. But yeah, it is not. I'm imagining the homeless population in Missoula. Should that be the person you're imagining? No. Are there probably 15 or 20 of them in Missoula? Probably at any given in the summertime. And that's the last part of of the migration piece is weather matters. So the story is slightly different in Southern California. You know, Southern California really does attract homeless migration because it's a much nicer place to be outside in Missoula most of the year. This is not our issue. Like I said, if you're here in the summertime, there may be some people who are in this more transient group that will choose to kind of plop down here for June, uh, you know, it gets hot and smoky, then they might move on. But, you know, you might see a little bit more of it then. But yeah, that's basically what the data say on migration. And when it comes to the moral hazard, the same kind of stuff too, you know, does services increase the size of the homeless population? It might to some degree, but often in ways that we think are good. Right. So is it better to be homeless or in a house with domestic violence? Right. So if you have services, well, I'll move into the domestic violence shelter if I don't and I don't have a social network locally, I've been isolated from that. I might remain housed. But that's not that's probably not the better outcome from us as a social perspective. As a general rule, again, with the exception of the data clearly suggests there is a small percentage of people for whom homelessness is a lifestyle choice.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:09] There's also a small percentage of people outside of the NBA that can slam dunk. That's right.

Bryce Ward: [00:13:14] And you really are. That's the rough order of magnitude that you should be thinking of it. For the most part, homelessness is a miserable experience. Oh my goodness. People do not choose it because they want to be it. They become homeless because they lack the resources or the skills to manage their way out of it.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:33] There's that that often quoted, I'm going to quote it right now, that famous New Yorker article from a couple of years ago, the woman who compiled all this information said that short term homelessness is a combination of one person's living in a high cost of living place. They earn low wages, they endure a big, heavy duty financial impact event, and they don't have a social network. And when those things collide, then they become homeless. They didn't wake up one day and decide camping by the river might be more fun.

Bryce Ward: [00:14:00] And the third thing, it's not even big and heavy. The data suggests it's frequently small and tiny in the right for.

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:06] A middle class person a car.

Bryce Ward: [00:14:07] Repair. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, to people who become homeless again, we don't have great data that tracks homelessness over time. But what we do have is a bunch of researchers at the University of Chicago over the past several years, they teamed up with researchers at the Census Bureau, and in the 2010 census, the Census Bureau has to do kind of the point in time count stuff. They have to find all of the homeless people, because that's part of who lives here, and that's goes into all of the things that we are they're constitutionally mandated to do. And you have their names. So they then linked them to everybody who was identified as homeless in the 2010 census. And they've linked them, you know, in as many states as they can to any other records like W-2s, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, Snap death certificates to be able to find out where they were before we observed them as homeless, and what's happened to them in the 12 years since. And, you know, one of the things that came out, as, you know, again, we only have a snapshot of homelessness. We don't know how much time they were homeless before or after. We just know that on in April of 2010, they were observed. Just homeless. But, you know, in the four years prior to that, they have very low income, you know, and you don't see some big change. And then that year that leads them, tips them into homelessness. It's frequently a tiny change, $400. Yeah. It doesn't have, you know, it doesn't require big shocks to tip somebody who's already kind of just living at the fringe into homelessness. Now, what we then what happens is once they do tip, once we do observe you as homeless, you diverge.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:34] Given that logic or reasoning or truth, that's a better way to say it. If it doesn't take a big shock to push someone over the edge, it might not take a big intervention to keep them in place.

Bryce Ward: [00:15:43] Yeah, and that's one of the great things that we've seen in now, a couple of different studies. Um, but.

Juanita Vero: [00:15:49] It's ridiculously expensive to pull someone out once they fall in. There you go.

Bryce Ward: [00:15:53] Yeah, yeah. So there's been two high quality studies in the last, say, five, six years. So the first one was very clever. 93% of Americans live in a community with an emergency assistance fund. We in Missoula, it's run through the United Way. And emergency assistance funds are just that. You think you're in trouble, you call this number, and if they have money, they'll give you a few hundred bucks. And the idea is to keep you from tipping into homelessness. Now, the reality is, in a big city like Chicago, there's one number that you call, but then you kind of get matched to a bunch of different organizations. And on the day that you call the organization that you're matched with, sometimes it doesn't have any money. It's out. So now we basically have this experiment you called on a day where there was money. You called on a day asking for exactly the same amount of money when there isn't. And we can track you and see if you then show up in the homeless system over or in jail or anywhere. You know, we can do this because we know who you are. And when they do that, they find that, yes, these emergency assistance funds absolutely reduce homelessness over the next year to three years, depending on the study that's been done. So it's very cheap to keep people out of homelessness. Now it turns out that most of the people call don't end up homeless. They figure out other ways. It turns out that, you know, you add it all up. The cost of averting a spell of homelessness in Chicago is like $10,000, but the benefits just from low level benefits, not even really getting into big level benefits of preventing homelessness are like $20,000. So it's still pencils out from a benefit cost perspective.

Juanita Vero: [00:17:17] What happens here?

Bryce Ward: [00:17:18] You know, here, I mean, we haven't tracked it here. Typically the amount of money is usually equal to what in the various markets about a month of rent. Right. That's typically what you are paying out. What you do amongst those who receive it. You reduce homelessness typically by about 90%, 90%.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:34] So this sounds like people people who.

Bryce Ward: [00:17:36] Get people who get the money don't become homeless. It's exceptionally rare now, a lot of people get money who wouldn't become homeless regardless, that's the inefficiency that you can try and target.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:45] Part of the cost.

Bryce Ward: [00:17:45] Part of the cost, you know, and the other study, they did a similar version of this where they I think it was actually even more explicitly random because they knew they didn't have enough money. They did it in Santa Clara, California. Rent is higher, so it costs about $3,000 a recipient there. It was basically identical results in terms or nearly identical results in terms of averted homelessness. And then the benefit of this is not only do we get to learn that you didn't become homeless, we also learned that, oh, wait, you didn't get arrested, you didn't commit crimes. There is a causal link between homelessness and certain types of crime. We learn about the link between homelessness and employment. So when you don't become homeless, you maintain your job. But when you tip into homelessness, it's harder to maintain a job because for a whole bunch of reasons, you know, they're really great studies in terms of helping us understand homelessness in similar studies, which have done kind of the same thing, but in reverse, where we give you a home and we in quasi random fashions have kind of found similar confirming results. So homelessness really does affect criminal propensity, it affects employment propensity and it affects health outcomes to varying degrees.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:49] So we heard as Dave was pointing out, the build it and they will come well building it costs money. So we've heard criticism of oh, you're spending this much money on homelessness. And that dollar total is readily available because people can figure out or look up or ask how much money we at the county put towards Johnson Street if we were to not do that, if the city was to not do that, what would the cost be? Would it be, well, it's free now. We know we're not paying any money because we're not spending any money on homelessness.

Bryce Ward: [00:19:16] No, uh, you just pair the cost in different ways. Well, how do you mean? Right. So. Okay, so when we talk about the cost of homelessness, we can divide it into two buckets from the community's perspective. Right. So since we talked about earlier, most of people who experience homelessness in Missoula are Missoula residents. The cost to them count. And then also then there's the costs on others from being adjacent to or near in the community with homelessness. So let's talk about both of those. So first the cost to those experiencing homelessness are enormous. So that same study, the one that the Chicago study I talked about earlier that looked at the 2010 over 12 years mortality rates, they're like three times higher, you know, for that group of people that were identified as homeless. The easy way to remember is if you're a 40 year old homeless person, you have the mortality rate of a 60 year old housed person. And we see the same thing with chronic illnesses. You know, I mean, it's like early onset aging is basically what happens to people who are homeless, right? They basically start suffering from a whole bunch of chronic health things that we associate with people that are ten, 20 years older than them. It increases substance abuse. It can make it go away, too. But for a lot of people, it's a survival mechanism, right? If I'm living in an unsheltered environment where I am concerned about studies, find different rate, but 25 to 50% of people experience violence while homeless, right? So if I'm concerned and 50% have their stuff stolen, so I'm concerned about losing my stuff or getting attacked. Well, I don't want to sleep. Yeah, I certainly don't want to sleep at night. Yeah. So what do I do? I take meth or I turn to other substances. You know, this kind of pathway as well established in the literature. So for a lot of homeless people, homelessness exacerbates problems by increasing my drug use. Not as because I'm want to be a drug user, because it's a survival and coping mechanism. I can see.

Josh Slotnick: [00:20:58] The drug use exacerbating the homelessness now. And it.

Bryce Ward: [00:21:01] Does. No. And you know, and look, I mean, you know, when you combine substance abuse, depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, all, you know, kind of your main suite of, of mental health disorders, I mean, the consensus in the literature, kind of a meta analysis of a bunch of them, it's like 75% of people experiencing homelessness have at least one mental health challenge. You know, a lot of it is because, yeah, they already had that going on. But a lot of it is it's bidirectional.

Juanita Vero: [00:21:25] So Strohmeyer is going to rip his pen apart.

Josh Slotnick: [00:21:27] Oh, I want to see if you could put some dollars to the those costs we will get.

Bryce Ward: [00:21:30] Yeah. Go ahead.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:21:31] Dave. Well yeah. Yeah. Speaking of dollars, uh, everything you said, Bryce, is super compelling in terms of the benefit cost analysis and taking it to the next step as far as what Josh is looking at as far as quantifying costs and such, have there been studies done looking at the attitudes of the general populace towards that benefit cost analysis? And by that I mean what I sometimes see is, even in the face of the truth, that investing in mitigation measures to keep folks from drifting into homelessness will see results by way of diminished costs in our kind of more diffuse health care system or criminal justice system. Still, the thought of paying tax dollars to support folks who are not earning that wage themselves just becomes almost unsurmountable, even in the face of of the reality that savings will accrue.

Bryce Ward: [00:22:25] Yeah, that's a tough one. Part of the hard part is, is that we don't have perfect estimates of all of the impacts. It's really easy to look up what you guys spend, what the county spends, what the city spends, what charitable compensation spends, what the feds spent. You know, we can measure all of that. Do we have great estimates of all of those costs? Now there are some papers that try. Typically what you find is it's on the order of magnitude of like $10,000 per homeless per year. When you go all in on law enforcement costs, sheltering costs, health care costs, it's a big number, you know, and it's like, well, what do I get for that? Well, what do I get when I don't do it? Is the real question right. And I was I was working through the costs to the individuals which are bad. But community is also there incurring those costs. Right. Yes. When homelessness increases by 10% and then we have to expend and it doesn't have to be an increase in the budget. But if if more law enforcement time is now being expended dealing with calls related to homelessness or the Parks department is spending more resources, cleaning up bathrooms and picking up garbage, then putting on new programs. We're all suffering from that. And then the costs get really big. When you say, look, the reality is, is that the general population does not like homelessness. They do not like to encounter it. They definitely don't like to see tents on the on the river, or be concerned that if they go hike the Ken Williams trail or they're going to have an uncomfortable encounter, or if they come downtown, they're going to be accosted, people change their behavior. Well, that's a cost, too, to an economist, right.

Josh Slotnick: [00:23:59] To ask you about this. So I had this experience in another major population center in Montana and was staying at a really cool hotel right downtown about 9:00 at night. I realized I had to get to my car so I could grab my earbuds to plug them in, super mundane, and just walked out into the night to my parked car, not giving a second thought, and I'd gone maybe 100 yards and I realized, man, this really cute downtown I had been in earlier. Around dinnertime. It was bustling with people. Now there's no people like, oh, it's not quite that. There's no people. There's a cluster of folks on that corner and that corner and that corner, and they all appear to be homeless. And now they appear to be walking towards me. So I'm going to pick up my pace, get to my car and jog back to this hotel. And I'm thinking, this once bustling downtown is now dead quiet. There's a cost being paid here. These businesses aren't open. This neighborhood is now populated by unhoused folks who may or may not be scary, but are certainly perceived as scary. I perceived them as scary. Maybe they're coming over to say hello, but I ran back to my hotel.

Bryce Ward: [00:24:56] And, you know, and that's the reality, right? Is it doesn't take a lot of, you know, even if 90% of encounters with homeless people in a downtown area are completely mundane and don't bother anybody at all. And. When you live in a big city, you get used to it, right? Like I you literally know them, right? You know, the panhandlers they're on, like a cycle. They just show up and it's just like, okay, it's that guy, that guy, that guy. But, you know, sometimes erratic behavior is observed and sometimes truly heinous crimes occur, right? Like, you know, those studies I talked about earlier that they do establish that homelessness is associated with crime. Right. And again, when you have 75% of that population with substance abuse challenges or some form of other mental health challenges, that's not surprising. So it's not irrational to be afraid of encounters with homeless people. That's why the costs of homelessness and why it's important that we invest resources in managing them. Because and I know people because when I give the study, I heard all the stories. Yeah, I won't take my kids here.

Bryce Ward: [00:25:58] We spent a bunch of extra money on security. These costs, if we had true measurement of them. The simple one, right? I was on an interview committee for a candidate and we went to breakfast at Finn. I could not help but notice the eyes darting across the river to the tent encampments and wondering, is this going to change their willingness to accept an offer if we make one? If an incident happens with a student at the university, right, you're going to hit enrollment. All of these things are part of the cost of homelessness. And so when it comes to investing money, yeah, you've got to figure out the best way to try and first order challenge is how do we reduce the number. Right. And then second, given some amount of homelessness, what's the best way to support and manage that population in a way that minimizes the impact on the community? And that's where there's only debate at that point because there's no good solution. The solution that everybody wants is I don't want homelessness anywhere that I want to go.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:58] Yeah, right. Right.

Bryce Ward: [00:26:59] Keep it out of my neighborhood. Yeah. Uh, at any place that I has, like a place of business that I might visit or a trail or a park that I might visit. If it's in some other part of town, then it's. Who cares, right? You know, because again, the costs are setting aside the cost to the people experiencing homelessness. Yeah, there's some larger costs to all of us from we pay higher taxes for something or whatever it is. But for the most part, the costs are local. You're within a quarter mile, a half mile, 100 yards of a shelter or an encampment or whatever it is. The data are clear. There are impacts. And so, yeah, give me those tools to call the police and say, hey, these people are here and they shouldn't be here. And there's a law on the books, move them. And the problem becomes, is I can keep sweeping dust around in my house.

Josh Slotnick: [00:27:45] Yeah, but dust is still in your house.

Bryce Ward: [00:27:47] If it's still in my house, what we have to. You have to have the hard conversations about. Okay, is sheltered homelessness better than unsheltered homelessness? And I think for the most part, it probably is. That doesn't mean that people then want shelters necessarily in their neighborhoods, but I probably would collectively, if we all got a random sample of Missoulians and really kind of laid it out for them and said, well, what's the best option? We'd be? Yeah, I don't want a bunch of random encampments. So I would prefer that we it doesn't have to be one shelter, but I would prefer there be designated locations. Yeah. So and just an.

Josh Slotnick: [00:28:20] Anecdotal thing on this generally in the culture, we hear a lot of complaints about homelessness in places like Portland and Seattle and LA and San Francisco, where you have people living outdoors, don't hear very much complaints about New York. New York has this legal thing set up. Everybody has a right to housing, so they have a culture of shelter. It's not a culture, a political economy of shelters where the city collects tax money and then they RFP for shelters. Reportedly, some of the shelters are not very good. Some of them are better. Nobody likes living next to one, but very few people are living outside compared to those other population centers that I mentioned. And we hear a whole lot less complaints about homelessness from New York than those other cities. I don't know what to make of that, given it's not the result of any study. It's just the.

Bryce Ward: [00:29:03] The impacts of unsheltered homelessness appear to be larger than sheltered homelessness for two reasons. One is unsheltered homelessness can pop up literally anywhere, and that means that it can show up in the heart of your most dense, highly trafficked areas. And then the second part of it is, is a lot of shelters have rules. So unsheltered homelessness is often self-selected based on who doesn't want to be in a shelter. Now, sometimes it's because of a bad experience in a shelter. They don't want to be there. I don't want to say that it's only this, but if I don't want to follow the rules and even the low barrier shelter has basic rules, right? Like you can't be a danger to others. You can't be depending on the place. Some allow for some degree of intoxication, but it can't be spilling over and creating an uncomfortable environment for others, or an unsafe environment for others. So yeah, I mean, if I'm off the rails, I'm most likely to be an unsheltered homeless person. And so that's where you run into challenges in terms of if you accept a higher degree of unsheltered homelessness, which is basically what happens when I don't invest in shelters. Yeah. Well. Then what's the plan for managing this issue? Well, you know, the Grants Pass case is fundamentally about well, I don't have shelters, but I'm going to find you. And every time you try and sleep in a in a public place, you know, I don't want to necessarily say that communities can't have quality of life rules, because I think it's important that places have parks and that people are allowed to go to those parks.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:28] But finding people who have no money.

Bryce Ward: [00:30:30] Yeah. You know.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:31] But where do you go from.

Bryce Ward: [00:30:32] There? Yeah. You have this challenge. Part of the challenge is, again, something like 25% of the local population isn't even from here. You need to have the financing structure. People locally should be annoyed if they're being asked to fund the full suite of expenses for the whole region, because, you know Missoula County well, Missoula County is a huge county, so we get a lot of our you know, you guys are part of the to the extent that you're working with the city on all of this and participating. Okay, fine. But if people from Ravalli County or Lake County or Middle County or Granite County or are they contributing to the Johnson Street shelter? Right. So I.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:31:10] Guess that brings.

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:11] Up people.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:31:12] Yeah, that brings up a great question that that comes to mind based on your research, any actionable recommendations and one point that you just made that I think is worth noting is that we do not live in an island unto ourselves here. And so what happens regionally and nationally has an effect on homelessness in Missoula. Right?

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:35] As a prescription, doctor Bryce.

Bryce Ward: [00:31:36] Okay. Well, so, you know, if you think about the framework, how do people end up homeless? You kind of laid it out with the New Yorker reference. The first thing we talk about are market outcomes. Can you earn money in the labor market? How expensive is housing and other stuff? Because other stuff, necessities also matter. Keep working on those levels. Make sure that you are supporting a robust labor market. You know. Keep demand for workers high. Make sure that there's training programs and you know all of the things to keep people in the labor market attached to labor market and climbing the ladder of the labor market. So do everything you can to keep people from falling off the income ladder. Same thing on the housing side. They think of a housing ladder. Make sure that it goes all the way down. A lot of communities have tried to get rid of the bottom rung of housing because it's distasteful esthetically, like, oh, we don't want that old cheap housing. It's ugly zoning out multifamily. We don't want that temporary residence hotel like you used to see in the movies all the time. I mean, it's like Tom Hanks goes in big, right? Yeah. You know, flop house all. Yeah. You know, all of the old 80s comedies, right? You know, when Michael J. Fox in Secret of My success. Right. You know, like these, these kind of dingy, horrible. You look at them, you're like, God, that's terrible.

Josh Slotnick: [00:32:43] But it's not outdoors. It's not.

Bryce Ward: [00:32:45] Outdoors. It's the bottom rung of the housing ladder.

Juanita Vero: [00:32:48] You're talking about, like single occupancy units, single.

Bryce Ward: [00:32:50] Occupancy SROs, you know, or, you know, but or just cheap old houses, you know, manufactured housing. Like, whatever it is, I think it's better to have a greater mix of housing that allows the housing ladder to go to the bottom rung than to be saying, oh, we don't have that, but we'll deal with homelessness, right? You know, but that's the trade off. Those are trade offs. That's my opinion. People may disagree. Maybe the esthetics are worth the homeless problem. But you have to understand that those are linked. So that's the market level. Then we move into the safety net level. And I've talked a lot about formal safety net programs. So from a prescription yeah. Emergency assistance. Great.

Juanita Vero: [00:33:27] All the programs out there shelters.

Bryce Ward: [00:33:29] And shelters are great for two reasons. One is they take people out of unsheltered homelessness, but they become then the touch point for getting you the rest of the resources that you need to move into something more permanent to address whatever issues you may be having. It's then the collection point for trying to make sure that you get the resources. Then ultimately some form of rehousing support aligned from an article which I like, which is that there's literally no program that has ever worked for rehousing people. That doesn't include housing subsidies, right?

Juanita Vero: [00:33:58] What about the social capital or the.

Bryce Ward: [00:34:00] Yeah. So that's the informal side. So the informal safety net is an important part. You know I talked about doubled up earlier. So the best estimate that we have of the number of people that are so they're not the renter, they're not the homeowner. They're crashing with other people. It's six and a half times the size of the point in time count.

Josh Slotnick: [00:34:16] Holy. Wow. So those people are that that's frail. It's it's it's built on the foundation of those relationships. If they built on relationships.

Bryce Ward: [00:34:24] And this California study, which is the Benioff Center at the at UC San Francisco, they did this enormous study of across the entire state. So not just in San Francisco or L.A. they went everywhere in the state. They did thousands of surveys and then almost a thousand interviews. One of the questions that they asked was, okay, well, give me the pathway. What led to your homelessness? Right. And, you know, they could answer lots of different stuff. And for people who were renting. So they were the leaseholder. Right. So my my name was on the lease. It's a lot of economic stuff. I lost my job, rent went up. And you know, there's some social stuff there too. I got divorced. But if you were not a lease holder and it's important to note that half of people were non leaseholders prior to becoming homeless, it's the biggest category.

Juanita Vero: [00:35:04] Second biggest is tenuous relationships.

Bryce Ward: [00:35:06] And so and then 10 to 15%. Our leading institutions, right? So they're getting out of prison or whatever. But if I'm a non leaseholder, it's mostly social stuff. Couldn't get along, didn't want to overstay my welcome. You know all these kind of very much social dynamics. Let's say that there aren't economic because a lot of times maybe I'm renting but I'm I'm paying something but I don't maybe not a lot. And I lost my job and now I can't even pay to help cover the utility bill or whatever it is that I was trying to do. So there are economic things in that realm as well. But, you know, for the most part, if you're saying, [00:35:35] well, what is the cascade that leads to homelessness? There's usually a pit stop on a couch or with some friend or with whatever it is that population is six and a half times the size of the. When we go out and do the point in time count, that means that we're not even accounting for the biggest piece of the safety net. We're not even trying to manage it. And we have lots of evidence that suggests that we're doing a really bad job of managing it. [00:35:58]

Josh Slotnick: [00:35:58] How would we bolster that informal safety net?

Bryce Ward: [00:36:01] It's about relationships. So much of what what's happened in modernity, and it's a multi-decade process at this point, right, is the fraying of social capital, the intrinsic value of social relationships and the fact that I've been spewing because I, since I found it in the American Time Use survey a few months ago, is Americans don't spend time with their friends anymore. We spend a lot less time with friends. It's like 4,050% down. But it's easy to think of that and be like, oh, well, that's this feel good? You know, I'm just not hanging out with my friends. But we're starting to see the evidence that it is starting to infect things that I think are very concerning to me. And the two that I found in the American Time Use survey a few months ago.

Juanita Vero: [00:36:41] I say that again American what time use survey.

Bryce Ward: [00:36:44] So this is lovely survey that literally every day of the year except for Christmas and maybe Thanksgiving, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls people up and says, tell me about what you did yesterday. And five minute intervals go through your entire day. Where were you? Who were you with, what were you doing? And sometimes they even ask how you felt during some of it. And we've done this for over 20 years now. We have 20 years of the exact same survey being done. So we can look at trends over time and how the average day of an American has changed. We're spending a lot less time relative to a decade ago. We're spending hours more alone, and all of that is basically coming out of time with others, right. Where were things we used to do with our friends or family or whatever it is? We just don't do it. But now we're also seeing, you know, the thing that's just declined in almost exact same proportions are. So, say, 20 years ago, a typical American reported spending time helping others outside their household, driving your mother in law to a doctor's appointment, watching your neighbor's kids. This was like a twice a week activity and the most recent data in 22. It's once a week. Wow. Right? So it's basically cut in half. Same thing has happened to volunteer time. People do not report spending nearly as much time volunteering. And there's very clear patterns in this data. Right. So the social time that's all of us. All of us are spending less time with our friends. Young people in particular are not.

Juanita Vero: [00:38:00] What's your age range? When you say young people?

Josh Slotnick: [00:38:02] So say under 30.

Bryce Ward: [00:38:04] Yeah, 15 to 25, 15 to 25. Males like it's 70% decline in their time, reported spending, helping others or volunteering.

Josh Slotnick: [00:38:12] So they're primed for internet over.

Bryce Ward: [00:38:15] 65 female okay, you're still doing it. You're down. But it's only like 1,520%. And as you get younger or become more male, your engagement with the community is less. Now, why does this matter if I'm not putting into the system by offering assistance to people, you're.

Juanita Vero: [00:38:31] Causing problems you're taking.

Bryce Ward: [00:38:33] Where am I going to turn when I need help?

Josh Slotnick: [00:38:37] Yeah, there's nowhere to turn.

Bryce Ward: [00:38:38] People have family. That's where you're going to turn, for the most part with this stuff. But if you don't have a well established norm of reciprocal social social exchange, the literature is very clear. People who have resources in their social network don't become homeless.

Juanita Vero: [00:38:52] That reciprocal social exchange.

Bryce Ward: [00:38:53] Yeah. You know, you know, I have resources in my social network. Of course, I'm not going to become homeless. I got lots of people I can call. Hey, I need help. You know, we'll figure this out. But particularly as you move into the lower income spectrum, you deal with more people who are struggling with a variety of health and mental health challenges. Yeah, you're already in a weaker spot to begin with. Literally, in my network of people, I could call people that I went to high school with, right. In fact, a lot of the most important people that I would call were people that I went to high school and college with, why? I spent an enormous amount of time building a relationship with those people, because that's what you do when you're young. Yeah. And to the extent that you're not doing it as a young person, I'm very concerned. What this means long term is like, look, if you haven't invested from age 15 to 25 before you got married and had kids, well, look what happens. At least to me. I got married and had kids. Now I don't make friends with anybody. Right?

Josh Slotnick: [00:39:44] Like, totally know what you mean.

Bryce Ward: [00:39:46] That's my social network is here. But if I need stuff, I still have this reservoir that I built up.

Josh Slotnick: [00:39:51] Right. What do you think about age gating remote work? You got to be 30 before you can work remotely. And the same thing with online education just forced young people to be with each other. We have to.

Bryce Ward: [00:40:01] Figure out, you know, back to the larger question. What do you do about it? We have to do more to figure out how. How to make in-person interaction more attractive to people. But the point is, is you have to do something to make it appealing, but you also then have to try and do what you can to make the distractions less appealing. Right. It's a substitution thing. This is what's taking us away. How do we make that less appealing? And sometimes that might be by regulating it, taxing it. And then what are we doing on to make sure that people understand the value of this and that we're doing things that make it so that they want to do it. We're social animals. We want to be engaged with this. But what what's happened is we've changed the environment that we live in, in ways that we are not well adapted to. We don't have the language, we don't have the tools. So what's happened is we basically just change the world and turns out that our appetites, our brains, we did not evolve to live in this world. And just like with food, I can get really full on empty calories and I can get full on distraction of things that keep me on an.

Juanita Vero: [00:41:04] Empty relationship.

Bryce Ward: [00:41:05] Empty without, without investing relationships.

Juanita Vero: [00:41:07] But what is something, a truth or a myth or something that you learned over the course of your your research for this study or something that surprised you?

Bryce Ward: [00:41:15]  [00:41:15]The biggest myth that I think needs to get busted are one that it's all migrants. It's not. Most homelessness is local. And the second myth you hear is that people want to be homeless. And when you go through the long list of impacts of homelessness and if you're homeless on a daily basis, you have to find somewhere to sleep, find food and a means to prepare it. Find places to bathe. Go to the bathroom. You have to secure your stuff against either theft or seizure, you know? And the list goes on and on and on. I have a certain amount of time and motivation and focus and effort available to me. That takes a lot. And then at the end of that, I still have enough left over to find a job, to find a housing, to find whatever social services that I can try and access. The math doesn't add up in terms of how does this get resolved without a bunch of help from others. [00:42:05]

Juanita Vero: [00:42:05] Yeah. You got to wrap up with the last question.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:42:08] Yeah, I feel like we could keep rolling for another hour. This is great stuff. Well, Bryce, as per our tradition, before we totally wrap up today, we ask all of our guests to indulge us by telling us a little what nuggets of truth you might have stumbled onto lately. Have you read a good book?

Bryce Ward: [00:42:26] So, you know, my job is to read, and unfortunately, it's to read boring academic articles. And if I read a book, it's usually a boring academic book. So it's sad. But reality is, is that one of my free time? I don't read, but I do have some nuggets of truth, and it's related to what we were just talking about. So a few weeks ago, Derek Thompson in the Atlantic, he he wrote an article about the decline in religion and how that might help explain some of our social challenges. Right. And basically summarizing what's in Jonathan Hite's new book about the anxious generation. Right. But he said Digital Life is disembodied, asyncronous, shallow and solitary. And he was basically saying religious ritual. And I don't think it needs to be religious. A wedding, a party, a Rotary Club meeting to some degree satisfy all these queries. They're embodied, right? I am there physically synchronous. We are there at the same time, breathing the same air and experiencing the same energy deep. Now that one doesn't always apply, but religious it does. And collective. And a lot of our challenges that we're dealing with, it's easy to succumb to the temptation of digital, the empty calorie metaphor, the distraction, and so much of who we are as people is what stresses and we've been exposed to and how do we adapt to them.

Bryce Ward: [00:43:35] And we have this whole new set of stressors that we're not adapted to. And so the wisdom is, how do we kind of figure out how to sit people down, people who are different in various ways, but for the vast majority of people, embodied synchronous, deep and collective. It really does produce joy and meaning, and we know that. And yet we can't figure out how to do it. And so, you know, yeah, the wisdom is it's not wisdom. It's really more of a challenge for people to say, what can you do to figure out how to encourage those types of activities in your life? Because I think just linking it back to homelessness, but what we're going to face, challenges in life, whether it's a homeless challenge or something else, and the only way that you have those relationships to draw upon is through shared, embodied, synchronous, deep experience.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:44:19] Thanks, Bryce, for joining us today.

Bryce Ward: [00:44:21] Thanks for having me

Juanita Vero: [00:44:21] Thank you so much. From an economist who's essentially telling us to go to more festivals and concerts.

Bryce Ward: [00:44:28] Exactly, I really am.

Juanita Vero: [00:44:31] Thank you so much, Bryce.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:44:32] Yeah. Thank you.

Josh Slotnick: [00:44:32] Thanks for listening to the agenda. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot. If you rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you use.

Juanita Vero: [00:44:40] And if you know a friend who would like to keep up with what's happening in local government, be sure to recommend this podcast to them.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:44:46] The agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners is made possible with support from Missoula Community Access Television, better known as MCAT, and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division.

Josh Slotnick: [00:44:59] If you have a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, email it to communications@missoulacounty.us to.

Juanita Vero: [00:45:06] Find out other ways to stay up to date. Is what's happening in Missoula County. Go to Missoula.co/countyupdates.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:45:14] Thanks for listening.