Booked on Planning

Homelessness is a Housing Problem

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 7

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Addiction, mental illness, or poverty may explain why an individual may lose their housing—but these factors fail to explain why Seattle has five times more homelessness than Chicago. Through rigorous analysis, Colburn demonstrates that high rent prices and low vacancy rates are the true culprits behind regional homelessness variations. This revelation transforms how we should approach solutions.

Colburn advocates reframing housing as essential infrastructure—just as we invest billions in roads and transit without controversy, we must prioritize housing development as a public necessity. This perspective shift could unlock the political will needed to address our housing shortage crisis meaningfully.

Whether you're a policymaker, planner, or concerned citizen, this conversation offers crucial insights for understanding and addressing one of America's most persistent challenges. Listen now to discover how changing our approach to housing could transform our response to homelessness.

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Stephanie Rouse:

This episode is brought to you by JEO Consulting Group. Jeo is a full-service firm offering engineering, architecture, surveying and planning to clients throughout the Midwest. Since JEO's beginnings in 1937, they have grown to more than 12 offices across Nebraska, iowa and Kansas. With over 250 employees, they provide innovative and cost-effective solutions for both public and private sectors. The JEO team of professional engineers, architects, surveyors, planners and financial experts all work in concert with skilled technicians and support professionals to exceed their clients' expectations.

Stephanie Rouse:

You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode we talk with author Gregg Colburn on his book Homelessness is a Housing Problem how Structural Factors Explain US Patterns. As Gregg reminds us in the interview, this book is really focused on the factors that explain homelessness at a regional level, not at the individual level. So while factors like poverty or addiction will predict why someone might end up losing their housing, it does not explain why Chicago has less homelessness than San Francisco.

Jennifer Hiatt:

This book is a fantastic, deep dive into what is most likely one of the worst culprits of our housing crisis today at a city level an overall lack of housing at every affordability level. Without housing, our crisis response systems become a bottleneck for people entering homelessness that have nowhere to go to exit the system.

Stephanie Rouse:

Thinking of the homeless response system in a systems approach, as the book advocates for as well as infrastructure, like we would think of building roads, was an enlightening perspective. If we can shift our thinking to treating home building the same way that we do road building, we could boost support for getting more housing built to help alleviate homelessness in our cities.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Hopefully, after this discussion, you will see the benefit of shifting your perspective on homelessness. Let's get into our conversation with author Gregg Colburn on his book Homelessness is a Housing Problem how Structural Factors Explain US Patterns.

Stephanie Rouse:

Gregg, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book. Homelessness is a Housing Problem, how Structural Factors Explain US Patterns. So foundational to tackling any problem is to have a good set of data to understand the issue In the world of homeless services. One of these data points is the point-in-time counts, which is not always the most reliable data set. Why is it so hard to calculate the full extent of homelessness in our communities, and is there a better approach?

Gregg Colburn:

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast with you. So I mean, this is a difficult population to count. I mean that's the simple answer to this question, and I think that's a pretty intuitive for most folks. When they hear that the point in time count is inaccurate or not as precise as we'd like it to be, it's like it's understandable why that's the case. And so there's been a lot of research over the years showing that the point in time count is likely an undercount and potentially a significant undercount, and particularly with folks who are living in unsheltered situations, because it's sometimes hard to find them if they're in the woods or under a bridge or whatever the case may be. And so you know there's been a lot of time spent thinking about how we can improve that. I was actually just at a presentation last evening with some researchers from the University of Washington who have been working with King County to improve their method of counting and estimating the homeless population, using kind of a snowball sample, where you talk to someone and they refer you to people and they are making the argument that this will lead to a more precise measure not perfect, but a more precise measure, and so I think, collectively, the nation is trying to move in that direction.

Gregg Colburn:

We use the pit count in our book, and people said, well, how could you use numbers that we know are wrong in your book? And what I say to that is the reason we're comfortable doing that is we're taking a pretty broad brush, look, which is we're saying that Seattle has five times the homelessness of Chicago. Might that be six times, very possibly. You know, the undercount is probably greater in Seattle than in Chicago, and so we are not making a precise analysis. I think when you try to make precise analyses with the PID count, that's where it becomes problematic. And so when people say, well, why don't you run the analysis of if rents go down by 10%, what's going to happen to homelessness? And that requires a really precise understanding of what happens year to year, and that's where things get a little dicey. And so the pit count is useful, it's important, it's great that we have it, versus not having it, with all of its shortcomings. We just have to kind of exercise humility in how we're using those numbers.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And just so we all get on the same page during the conversation. I know this is a difficult request, but can you kind of define homelessness and explain why this is actually somewhat difficult to do really?

Gregg Colburn:

For sure, for sure. So the definition of homelessness is not uniform around the world is the first point, and so what I'm going to I'll describe how we define it in the United States, provide some global context on how other people define it and then break down kind of the homeless population in the United States, which is important for this conversation. So US Department of Housing and Urban Development has defined homelessness as people who are living in homeless shelters and people who are living in locations that are unfit for human habitation. That's a quote from the definition, and so unfit for human habitation would include living in your car, living in a tent, living on a street, etc. What is not included in the US definition is, jennifer, if, out of the kindness of your heart, I fall intoa tough time and say can I sleep on your couch for a while, and you say yes, and I'm now living doubled up in your home, I'm not homeless per the federal, us federal definition.

Gregg Colburn:

In many jurisdictions in Europe that would be included in homelessness because I'm unstably housed, I've lost my tenancy or the place where I'm living, and the only reason I'm not homeless is out of goodness of your heart. And so there's been interesting research demonstrating that if we were to include doubled up situations in the United States, our number would be dramatically higher than it is right now. So it's a fairly limited definition. Even within that limited definition, we're now up over 700,000 people, which we know is an undercount. So this is not an insignificant number.

Gregg Colburn:

And then what's really important is to kind of break down that population, and we can do that in a variety of ways. One of the most common ways is just sheltered versus unsheltered, and so that's a key differentiation that HUD uses and local jurisdictions use to differentiate. And so you'll see places like New York City, which have huge shelters, huge capacity, where the large 95% of the people experiencing homelessness in New York City are residing in shelter, and the West Coast Seattle, all the way down to Los Angeles far more limited shelter systems, and so what you'll see is in many cases, more than half of the people experiencing homelessness are unsheltered One. The homeless populations are high, and the shelter response is more limited on the West Coast, and so the breakdown is different in different geographies.

Stephanie Rouse:

Your whole book is about what is the cause of homelessness and I think a lot of people, if you ask them, would give different reasons, and some of the examples might be addiction, causing them to lose their housing. But you describe in the book that these kind of things are just risk factors and not the actual cause. So can you describe the difference between what a risk factor would be and what the real driver of homelessness is, and why it's important to distinguish between the two of them?

Gregg Colburn:

Sure, and just to be really clear, those risk factors that you identify at the individual level are causes at the individual level. So what we're not saying is that addiction, mental illness, poverty aren't causes. They are if you're trying to predict the likelihood of homelessness for an individual person. The purpose of our book is to explain regional variation, to explain why some cities have a lot of homelessness. When your unit of analysis is a city, those factors are not causes of homelessness. That is not why Seattle has so much more homelessness than Chicago. And so what we do when we're looking at through a city lens, and what we say in the book is this book is about cities, not about people. It's not because people don't deserve dignity and respect and care and compassion. Of course they do.

Gregg Colburn:

What we're trying to do in this book is explain like what the heck is going on in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Explain like what the heck is going on in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's the purpose of the book. When you use that lens, when you use that focus, these other factors help to explain who becomes homeless in Seattle. It doesn't explain why Seattle has five times the homelessness of Chicago. So we would call, at a community level, the shortage of affordable housing as the root cause of this crisis and the primary explanatory factor of why Seattle has so much homelessness. And then these other individual risk factors are really sorting mechanisms that kind of help to identify people who aren't going to have a housing when there's not enough housing.

Jennifer Hiatt:

This level of homelessness, especially unsheltered homelessness, is a relatively new phenomenon that we started to see in the 1980s. So what are some of the causes of this crisis? As you say, like in the cities, big cities having disparate housing issues.

Gregg Colburn:

I'm going to just do a real quick history detour and then kind of get to the root of your question. But what was fascinating is we started to see more homelessness at the end of the 70s and early 80s. And this is at a time of the recession coming out of President Carter's term of president, and then Reagan gets elected in 80. And basically the public narrative at that point was we're in a recession, of course we're going to have homelessness, and then all of a sudden the economy starts to take off in the latter half of the decade of the 1980s and homelessness didn't disappear, and so this caused kind of a national reckoning of like well, wait a second, we are equating homelessness with economic downturns, which is what happened during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Right, we had massive homelessness around the United States, which was totally intuitive because we had 25% unemployment. Banks were failing, people were losing their homes. Again, one plus one equals two. That makes perfect sense. We tried to apply the same logic in the late 70s and early 80s, and then it didn't really hold. So that's when people really started to ask the question of like well, what's going on here? Because now the economy is humming unemployment's back down and yet we're still seeing homelessness. And that's when researchers really started to say, like well, there's probably something going on with the housing market here, and ultimately.

Gregg Colburn:

So what we do in our book is we kind of take this research that we've known for some time, package it in a way that's hopefully a little more accessible for general readers and we demonstrate that the problems that we have in New York and DC and Boston and Seattle and San Francisco and LA is not that we have more addicts or mentally ill people or more poor people. We certainly have those folks. So does every other city. The difference is is that we have really really high rents and really low vacancies, which means that if you're precariously housed or in a tough situation, it's a very little margin for error. You might be able to figure it out in St Louis, where rents are 750 bucks a month. Trying to figure it out in San Francisco when it's 2,500 bucks a month, is just really, really hard. So that's kind of the thesis that we're making is that these housing market conditions are really are by far the best explanatory factor for huge rates of homelessness in our coastal cities.

Jennifer Hiatt:

When most people think of the regional differences that we were just talking about in homelessness, we often hear well, those communities. They either encourage homelessness by providing social support or the weather is good there, so of course the unhoused people go there. But your book points out that the data shows that those factors really actually aren't all that important when we are talking about why this disparate action is occurring as well. So can you also explain this?

Gregg Colburn:

So those factors are I jokingly call them the cocktail party conversation around homelessness. When people lecture me about homelessness as I'm holding a glass of red wine, this happens far more than I would like, and certainly more than my wife would like, as she rolls her eyes. So, anyway, it's like, as the conversation goes, greg, it's warm in LA and it's cold in Chicago. Of course LA is going to have more homelessness, and so that's a true statement. I've lived in Chicago. It's very cold, but when we zoom out, there's plenty of warm locations that don't have a lot of homelessness cities in Arizona and Texas and Florida and there's a lot of cold places like Boston and New York that have tons of homelessness. And so it's really tempting to blame Mother Nature, because then we don't have to look at ourselves in the mirror is the way I kind of think about that explanation and it makes some intuitive sense of when you walk around LA and LA is pretty mild and temperate, and it's like, okay, yeah, I think I'd rather be homeless there than in Chicago. That might be true. I don't want to be homeless anywhere, let's be very clear about that. But yeah, it might be better than Chicago, but that could be true. But it also there's an implication in this idea is that people are then moving to those locations because of this temperate climate, which then gets into this whole magnet idea whether it's warm weather or generous benefits that we're creating the conditions to attract people to communities and that's why we have tons of homelessness on the West Coast.

Gregg Colburn:

And what we see in the research is very, very little evidence of that. Margot Kuchel at University of California, san Francisco, did this huge study of homelessness in California. They found that 90% of the people experiencing homelessness in California are from California. So is there an anecdote to the contrary, of course, and someone might get ahold of that person in a newspaper and write an article about it and that then cements in people's minds of that. This is a mobility story. Ultimately speaking, the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in communities are from that community. There is mobility from like suburban locations to the urban core, because that's where services and transportation exist, but state to state mobility that's not the story here. That's not why LA has a lot of homelessness. We test it in the book.

Gregg Colburn:

Looking at TANF, which is the primary federal welfare program for families, typically women and children what we see is people are not congregating in states with more generous benefits. People are not making locational decisions to uproot their lives for an extra $100 or $150 a month. Right, the idea of generous benefits we always have to put in quotation marks because they aren't terribly generous. They're just more generous than South Carolina, for example. And so because of the disruption to social networks and the cost in the inconvenience of moving, what we see is that low-income folks actually move state to state at very, very low levels. They tend to move a lot, but it tends to be local moves, it's not state to state moves.

Gregg Colburn:

And so this magnet theory of boy if we just stop providing benefits, then all of this will go away is super prevalent. It's been around for a long time and I kind of joke, but it's true. I've heard this almost every place I go and I tell people like that's not how magnets work, you all can't be the destination, like physics 101 would teach you that. Yeah, it's a sticky, prevalent explanation that almost has zero empirical support for it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Well, it doesn't seem to me to have too terribly much common sense support either. I mean, I do get. If you were going to be homeless, maybe you'd want to be warm, but people are people, regardless of their situation. Like you want to stay where your support system is. You want to be where your family and your loved ones and your friends are, where you might have a chance. So it never really made sense to me that people would just uproot entirely for, like you say, an extra a hundred dollars.

Gregg Colburn:

Right, it doesn't make much sense either, but there are plenty of people, for some reason, who want to blame the outsider, whether it's asylum seeker or migrant, or it's someone from Indianapolis moving to LA, it's just, it's prevalent.

Stephanie Rouse:

And also I think the issue with people's perception in that regard is that they're thinking a very narrow portion of the definition of homeless, just the people that they see unsheltered, not true homelessness that might be in a shelter, whether it's not going to impact them because they're within a building versus living on the streets.

Gregg Colburn:

Yeah, I think that's a super important point, and one of the analogies that I use for people is this iceberg analogy of homelessness, in the sense that the visible manifestation of homelessness that you might see on Third Avenue in Seattle is a small tip of the iceberg. That's visible, and what we don't see is people living in their cars, showering at the YMCA and then going to their jobs. We don't see women and children in shelter who are getting up and going to work and getting on a bus to go to school, and so that's a huge chunk of the homeless population that we don't see, and so we basically just focus on Joe on the street, and that's to us. Joe equals homelessness and it's an important part of homelessness and Joe deserves our compassion and treatment and respect and all that, but it's a very small sliver.

Gregg Colburn:

And you've already kind of mentioned this high level. But how does increased housing costs explain differences in regional rates of homelessness? Yeah, so when we plot just absolute rents, so just looking at what is the rent per month relative to rates of homelessness, what we see is an upward sloping line that has a fair amount of kind of statistical evidence behind it, far more so than drugs or poverty or mental illness or weather or whatever all those other things. And the way that we explain that is trying to get to $2,000 a month is hard and getting to 700 bucks is a little easier. So being poor in Detroit is no picnic, but through low age labor, familial support, public assistance, you might be able to get to seven 800 bucks a month, which is enough to keep you housed. Those supports certainly still exist in San Francisco, but they're just nowhere near enough to get you there, and so it's pretty simplistic.

Gregg Colburn:

No one's giving a Nobel prize for this analysis. That we do, but it's pretty compelling. Like there isn't a good counter example. Every place that has low vacancies and high rents in the United States has a lot of homelessness.

Stephanie Rouse:

And then, building on that, why does housing cost burden, a factor that the industry really relies on heavily to measure where we're at, not directly explain homelessness?

Gregg Colburn:

So I want to be really careful with this. High housing cost burdens do increase the risk of experiencing homelessness at the individual level. If I'm 50% cost burdened and the two of you are 25% cost burdened, I'm more likely to experience homelessness, no doubt. But what's interesting is, at a community level, high housing cost burdens are not predictive of high rates of homelessness. Why is that? One is our samples of the largest metro areas, so we don't look at midsize cities, and there is some research showing that when you get above 35% at a community level, you do have higher homelessness. In our sample we don't see it because housing cost burdens are actually pretty similar throughout the United States.

Gregg Colburn:

And this is one of my favorite trivia questions at a party when people are talking about housing what city do you think has a higher housing cost burden? Detroit or San Francisco? 99 out of 100 people will say San Francisco, of course, and the answer is Detroit. It's really shocking. Why does Detroit have such high housing cost burden? Their housing is cheap. Their incomes are unbelievably low. It's staggering when you look at average or median incomes in Detroit, and so the average renter in Detroit is highly, highly cost burdened. The average renter in San Francisco is paying a lot but wages are high. You know Seattle, we have a $20 minimum wage and so even you know working minimum wage in Seattle, you're making 40 grand a year.

Gregg Colburn:

So the point is is that the variation in housing cost burden is not doesn't show up as terribly predictive because of this kind of Cleveland, detroit, san Francisco kind of weird dynamic where you can have high housing cost burdens in places with very different dynamics. So that's where we kind of say like that's less predictive than just the absolute value of rent. Knowing what the absolute rent is is more important, at least for the analysis that we conducted in our book, not to suggest that housing cost burden isn't something that we shouldn't focus on. Of course it is. When you're 50% cost burden it constrains consumption on education and food and clothing and all this stuff that's really important and we know those households are more precariously housed and are at higher risk of homelessness. So I'm really careful not to dismiss that as something that we should care about from a policy standpoint. It's just not as predictive in our analysis.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Not just one factor, it's multiple factors all the time. There's never a silver bullet. Can we just build our way out of this problem? Will simply increasing the supply of housing correct the market, and should we be relying on the market to solve this problem?

Gregg Colburn:

I think the market should build a heck of a lot more housing. It should be easier, cheaper and faster to build more housing, and no, that alone will not end this, but fixing this without more housing will be really, really difficult. So I kind of refer to changes in land use and regulatory regimes as a necessary but insufficient condition to dealing with this. Once you have sufficient housing and you have vacancy, then, when you do have supports and subsidies in these programs, you can actually get people into housing, which is why we've seen sustained success in Milwaukee and Houston and other jurisdictions who had vacancy and cheaper housing. And then when you got vouchers or other supports from the federal government, you got a unit boom, we've got a voucher, let's get people in there. And so the problem with cities like Seattle is when we got rental assistance during COVID emergency rental assistance there wasn't a place to put people, literally wasn't a place to put people, and so it took a really long time for us to use these federal resources that we were praying for for decades, and finally the truck shows up with a bunch of money and we literally couldn't even use it, which was so frustrating. And so that's why you know your question's a really good one, and I'm always careful because people accuse me of just saying Greg just thinks we should build market rate housing. Everything's going to go away. I was like, no, you need to read the book.

Gregg Colburn:

That is not the point. It's certainly important. It's certainly important. We're three to seven million units short in the United States, according to a variety of sources. Developers, private developers, will build a lot of that housing because we just have a very limited subsidy program in the United States. But once we have that housing, then we can think about what subsidies and supports do we need to make sure that people can access that housing, and that's an important conversation for us to have. I'm grateful to have that conversation. So it's a both and as a professor, I always say it's D, all the above, like we need to do all those things. Just subsidy alone won't work because we still have this massive deficit of housing and just building more market rate housing and deregulating also won't be enough on its own.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, because even the cost of building new housing is so high that you're not building affordable units. I think here in Nebraska you can't build a single family for anywhere even near $300,000 anymore. That's like it's over in the $400,000 range and that's not an affordable unit to a household.

Gregg Colburn:

Not at all.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, I'm on the board of a land trust here in Lincoln and we attempt to subsidize for affordability and right now the best we can come in at it's $175,000, which is theoretically affordable at 80%. But even then, right now, we can't keep a house payment for $175,000 house below $1,700. It's ridiculous.

Gregg Colburn:

Yeah, I mean you throw 7% mortgage rates on that, and something that may have been three, four years ago with the three and a half percent mortgage is very different now with the 7% mortgage, and then building costs and labor costs have gone up too. So it's it's tough, and and I, I you know I say this all the time on the coast when I'm speaking like I've spent a lot of time in the Midwest on this talk and I'm deeply concerned about the Midwest and what I'm seeing in the housing market trajectory, and I've been in Green Bay and Cedar Rapids, iowa, and was just in Missouri last. Rents are going up and they're not starting to talk about homelessness and so it's really alarming.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah Well, and here at least in Nebraska, a lot of the problem too is that people have bought up all the land around a community. They see the picture and the intention is to keep the supply low, to keep the price high, because it's a lot easier to build one house and sell it for 700,000, and build 10 houses and sell them for 70,000. You know it's.

Stephanie Rouse:

So the solution that you propose in the book to make meaningful progress and homelessness is to shift our thinking around the issue to a systems approach. What does this look like?

Gregg Colburn:

housing costs, burdened and lose a job, and the next thing, you know, I can no longer make my lease payments. And then I'm calling my friend, jennifer, saying can I sleep on your couch? And then at some point Jennifer says you know, you've been here for a month, greg, it's time to get out. And then I end up at the shelter door or I'm sleeping in my car, or whatever the case may be. And so one of the reasons we have a huge homelessness problem is the flow into homelessness is far greater than our systems can exit people from that state. And so when we center housing in this conversation, it not only helps getting people out of homelessness, it also reduces the flow into homelessness. And so we have a crisis response system and I'm glad we do, because it saves lives and it cares for people, and that system consumes a lot of money. And so what happens is is that when we don't build housing, we get more people flowing in. We can't get people out of the crisis response system because we don't have housing, and what happens is we keep building larger and larger systems that consume lots and lots of money. New York City is the prime example of this. Their shelter system consumes billions of dollars a year and they just literally warehouse people in that system. A shortage of housing is causing people to enter, and there's not enough housing and affordable housing on the back end to get people out, and so what happens is people kind of get stuck. It's a bottleneck in that system, and so neither my co-author nor I would ever advocate for eliminating the crisis response. We absolutely need that, but what we also need is capital investment in housing and subsidy for housing, such that we don't need to keep building a larger and larger crisis response system, Because that, in my opinion, is a bridge to nowhere.

Gregg Colburn:

Is it better than potentially having people on the street? Yes and no? Some people will say yes, some people say no, but if you've ever spent any time in a homeless shelter, it's not a place that I would want to spend any material time. We know the impacts on kids are terrible once they get into shelter, right, and so we have to keep thinking about that. And I just think about LA all the time, which is the good people of LA who are working in the crisis response system just get torn apart in public opinion in the newspaper every day, we're actually getting a ton of people into housing. It's actually remarkable. But then the flow in is even faster and so the numbers go up. And then everyone says they don't know what they're doing, they're incompetent. It's like no, that's totally unfair, they're actually really good at what they do. What we're incompetent at is we've created the conditions for people just to be flowing into homelessness at such high rates.

Gregg Colburn:

And then I think the other point that's really important here is that we end up with these debates and this is certainly happening in Seattle right now which is, if we think about the marginal dollar. We're all constrained financially, so where are we going to put the next dollar? Do we put it into shelter or permanent housing? We probably do need more shelter in Seattle, given the rates of unsheltered homelessness here.

Gregg Colburn:

But what's interesting is when you think about a shelter as a system. If the length of stay in a shelter on average is 60 days, that means with each bed you can serve six people in a year, basically two months for each person, because homelessness tends to be pretty episodic. People are in and out in and out in and out. If, because you have more housing, you can reduce length of stay from 60 to 30 days, one that's good because it's less time in shelter for people, but you can now serve 12 people in that same shelter bed. So when you build more housing and you reduce length of stay, you're also increasing the capacity of your shelter system without building new buildings.

Gregg Colburn:

And so this whole like linking all these systems together is super, super important. And when the spigot's on and people are just coming to that system and they can't get out, then the whole thing gets mucked up. If people are staying there for a year, then one shelter bed serves one person, right, and then the whole system is not working the way it should. And so, again, it's easy to talk about it Like I can just pontificate about this, but I don't have to do it under the aliases no-transcript.

Jennifer Hiatt:

One of the points that you make in the book is that we should shift perspective on how we think about permanent supportive housing, shelter, housing, this type of thing, and start thinking of it the same way we think about public transportation. It's a public good. Government should be providing it. It's that simple. It's that simple. It's not easy. How could our listeners help support shifting policies and political will towards that systems approach and start thinking about these things in a much different way?

Gregg Colburn:

Yeah. So my current mantra and this is going to be my next book project is I want to reframe housing as infrastructure. Because once we start to talk about infrastructure, the relationship between the private market and the public sector blurs a little bit. I think one of the problems with housing is that we view it as a private good for the vast majority of people in the United States and then when we start to talk about government involvement in housing, we immediately go to Cabrini Green in Chicago or Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis and say that was a disaster. Why would we do that? And I worked hard, bought my own house, why shouldn't everyone else do that? And so I find that this privatization and kind of the private good nature of housing is super harmful when we start to think about these broader issues. Have our two largest employers, amazon and Microsoft, who've given billions of dollars for housing because they realize like they can't be a company if people can't afford to live in this region. If only software engineers can afford to live in Seattle and no one who's going to serve coffee or clean the headquarters at night or whatever can live there, they've got a problem. And so once we see these problems and then we kind of say well, housing is infrastructure, it's important for economic development, it's important for all sorts of things. Is infrastructure, it's important for economic development, it's important for all sorts of things? Then we open up ideas of oh well, we've made massive infrastructure investments on roads and bridges and ports and all these things, and no one's screaming socialism, and it's a good that everyone needs. So in our region we passed $55 billion for transit. These investments are long overdue. We should have done this 30 years ago. It was a fight, but done. You know, in a variety of taxes you might pay more when you go to the football game or park or you know whatever. I don't even know what all the taxes are. But we're getting to $55 billion over 25 years.

Gregg Colburn:

Our former governor, jay Inslee, who just stepped down after three terms two years ago we were in a meeting and he was telling me that he was going to propose $4 billion for housing grant, but just bonding, and it was greeted as if it was the most radical thing that had ever been proposed in political history, like $4 billion for housing. And I wanted to be like we just passed $55 billion for transit, 10 times that. Yet $4 billion for housing was like dead on arrival, I mean, it went nowhere, it was immediately out. And so I think part of the problem is is like we just don't think about it in that way. And so I think, changing the way that we think about housing, that it is vital to the health of communities, it's vital to the health of our economy, then we can start to have a broader conversation of oh well, what if government had a more active role in financing housing, such that you're not paying 7% on a mortgage, you're paying 1% when you develop it or you know whatever the case may be, and then you blur the lines between public and private and just recognize that communities are not going to be healthy and vibrant if people can't afford to live there.

Gregg Colburn:

Sometimes I feel like I'm spitting into the wind on that, but that's kind of the current message that I'm going for. I think it's really, really important, and I will say the one beneficial byproduct of this crisis is that I think more people are open to listening to that. Now In know in Seattle it's like I'm never going to see my grandkids because my kids and grandkids can't afford to live here, and now they're living in Iowa. You know that kind of sometimes it's selfishly motivated, but I frankly don't care how you get there. But if you kind of get to the point where this is a problem, it might be that you're just frustrated that you continue to see people on the street and you don't want that fine, different. Otherwise you're still not going to see your grandkids and there are going to be a lot more people on the street.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, when you write that book, we're more than happy to have you back on to talk more in depth about reframing the conversation as an infrastructure issue.

Gregg Colburn:

Happy to do it. I got to write the darn thing first.

Stephanie Rouse:

And as this is Booked on Planning, what books would you recommend our readers check out?

Gregg Colburn:

I recommend a lot of books when I'm on the road. One that I think is really important we didn't talk about this in this conversation, but it's super important is the local politics around housing decisions. You know, and so you just think about Tuesday night planning commission. They're going to talk about a multifamily housing development, and then five people show up and say no. And then, in the name of democracy, the city council or the planning commission says well, five people showed up, they said no, so the answer is no, and then we end up with a screwed up housing system. And so Katie Einstending colleagues at Boston University wrote a book called Neighborhood Defenders, which is an awesome description of basically how this process worked in Cambridge, massachusetts, but it's applicable to every jurisdiction in the United States, because whenever I bring this up, everyone laughs and says that's exactly what's going on in my community, and so what it demands of us is to kind of rethink civic engagement and planning processes, and because the problem with the way that we've done it to date is the people who would benefit from that housing are not invited to the meeting right, because you can't afford to live in Cambridge Mass. And so who shows up it's people like me over 50, they're white, they're single family homeowners and they say no. And then elected officials or appointees to these councils or commissions say, well, we have to listen to our constituencies. And so I think that's, for planners, a really important book. And the concept is super important because even if you buy the argument that we make in this book, we still have to get over this huge local political impediment of how do we then transition from where we are now to different land use, different built environment, all that kind of stuff, and so I think that's a really good book.

Gregg Colburn:

Another book that I would recommend and you know, I look at homelessness kind of from a structural perspective, and Kevin Adler and his co author look at homelessness from a very individual level and kind of centering relational breakdown or lack of relationship, and so their book is when we walk by. It's kind of an ethnographic look at homelessness and the work that Kevin's done in terms of connecting people experiencing homelessness with family members with whom they might be estranged. It's a super touching book, a compelling read. It kind of, to me, brings a nice counterbalance to our work, which is a little more clinical and not super personal. The reality is there are real people behind all of this, and so I really appreciate Kevin and Don's work on this book and kind of bringing that to light.

Gregg Colburn:

Another homelessness book that I would recommend is a recent publication from Brian Goldstone called there's no Place Like Us, and it's another ethnography of folks who are working in Atlanta, who are struggling to maintain stable housing, and so, again, it's a really important story. You know, I think there's a debate about whether data or stories move people to action, and so I tend to move on data, and there's certainly people for whom that resonates, but for other folks it's these individual stories that really matter, and so I do think having a literature of both storytelling narrative as well as data is important, because we need to hit people where they are, and so those are a few books that have been a top of mind for me recently, but we could spend the next hour talking about great books, because there's so much important literature on this.

Jennifer Hiatt:

There is, I have read. There is no place for us, though, and it's so fascinating because when people think about homelessness, many think that those are the people who are just out panhandling, and not that there's disgrace or anything in any action that you have to take to survive, but people think, oh, these people are lazy, they have no job, they have no gumption whatever. But in reality, many of these people are working multiple jobs. As you said in Detroit, many of these people are working multiple jobs. As you said in Detroit, making $5 an hour takes multiple jobs to get up to a decent salary, so this book particularly hit me hard. I'm from the rural part of Nebraska and the people living in rural Nebraska it's a drive till you can afford type situation in a lot of ways, and they are busy, busy people. They're not just sitting around.

Gregg Colburn:

I mean in Seattle. The last census I saw was over half the people in shelter in Seattle are employed, and so there's just a misperception. And certainly there are folks who are not, and we still need to care for those folks and provide treatment et cetera, but there's a whole swath of people who are working pretty darn hard and still living in conditions that I don't think any of us would be real proud of as a society. That this is what's happening.

Stephanie Rouse:

Gregg, thank you so much for joining us on the show to talk about your book. Homelessness is a Housing Problem. How Structural Factors Explain US Patterns.

Gregg Colburn:

My pleasure. I enjoyed it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Gregg Colburn on his book Homelessness is a Housing Problem how Structural Factors Explain US Patterns. You can get your own copy through the publisher at the University of California Press or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked. On Planning planning.

People on this episode

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Jennifer Hiatt

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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

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