What does predict homelessness rates much more reliably is housing unaffordability.
Because the housing market functions like a giant game of musical chairs, when housing is insufficient, the result is vicious competition — and dire outcomes for the ultimate losers of the game. In high-cost cities, even middle-class people struggle to pay rent, while poor individuals crowd into increasingly precarious situations. One missed paycheck, medical emergency, or conflict with roommates or family can mean living out of a car (a large majority of homeless people are temporarily, not chronically, homeless, and most sleep in vehicles) or on the street.
High rents also strain the safety nets of those with incomes so low or unreliable that the market will never be able to serve them. As I wrote in "Escaping the Housing Trap," when rents are so high that even middle-class, employed people struggle to pay them, “we might end up subsidizing housing for schoolteachers and firefighters” rather than efficiently using limited subsidy dollars to help the truly poor. (Teacher housing subsidies are already routine practice in California, where schools face staffing shortages.)
A city serious about reducing its rate of chronic homelessness will urgently work to legalize the production of enough housing to meet needs across the market. This means reforming zoning codes to get out of the way of development in the neighborhoods where homes are needed (which is most of them); cultivating local developers who will build modest starter homes at scale; and using local financing tools to jump-start these efforts. And, of course, there’s a need for a lot more subsidy dollars to support permanently affordable housing for very low-income individuals.
Addressing the Problem From Hell — Next Week, Not Next Decade
Yet at the same time, these market-based reforms are a long-term, systemic answer. They are not any sort of short-term answer to the problems of people living on the street.
Endemic homelessness — when your city has people living in tent encampments every night — is a problem from hell. Let’s not pretend there are any simple or truly morally satisfying answers to this problem.
Do you choose the hard cruelty of forcibly breaking up encampments full of desperate people, tearing down tents and arresting individuals who will be released into the same desperate straits a day or two later? Of often depriving them of the only possessions they have in the process, and sending them packing knowing full well that they have nowhere to go? This is the case in Grants Pass, where shelter capacity is grossly inadequate and where the only shelter is a “high-barrier shelter” that many homeless residents will find themselves unable or unwilling to use because of (for example) their gender identities or addiction problems.
Or do you choose the softer cruelty of denying the residents of a city comfortable access to and use of its public spaces? Not to mention the soft cruelty of tolerating encampments rife with concentrated social dysfunction that are unsafe, above all else, for their own residents. (In Los Angeles, about a quarter of the city’s murder victims are homeless, even though homeless individuals only make up 1% of the population.)
I can already hear the chorus of “Stop being crybabies; the fact that the unhoused make you uncomfortable isn’t a real problem.” These reactions are common and well-meaning (rooted in empathy for people who are poor and suffering), but they are misguided.
The Grants Pass case arose in the courts because of a situation in which a long-term encampment took over a public park. This isn’t an isolated situation. I have friends in Minneapolis who effectively lost access to their neighborhood park when it was in use for a large encampment. This was during the COVID pandemic when outdoor recreation was a lifeline for mental and physical health.
Public transit is another area that can be a flash point when people with few options begin to use it as a sort of mobile shelter. I took my kids, ages 2 and 4, on the light rail recently and there were large amounts of trash, passengers who smelled of urine and a couple of riders who were plainly under the influence of drugs — one of whom I watched give herself an injection. It was a deeply unpleasant experience and difficult to explain to small children. (It was also not totally the norm, to be clear: We’ve had other, much less eventful train rides together as a family.)
Solutions to this are elusive. Being “mean” is not one, though.
I understand the frustration of city officials that might cause them to celebrate the Grants Pass decision, as local politicians up and down the West Coast have, including San Francisco’s mayor and California’s governor. It’s not heartlessness. It’s the brutal calculus of weighing a status quo that is cruel in an ongoing, drip-drip-drip way against an action to alter that status quo that is cruel in an acute and visceral way.
As in so many things, I think Strong Towns thinking is valuable here: act incrementally and iteratively, with the resources available, with a bias toward action and with an understanding that the best results happen when decision-making happens at the interpersonal scale, not the impersonal or bureaucratic one.
I’ve been impressed by the tiny house village efforts that seek to create a stable and self-policing social structure among homeless residents by giving them a sense of ownership and dignity in their space. Here is a very long, worthwhile read about this model of “tent city urbanism,” and here’s a shorter summary. It’s not a utopia, but it’s an affordable way to create a markedly better version of an encampment.
Even the term “village” is part of the strategy here. People will behave differently when they are cognizant of being in the place they live.
Another thing that a strong town should do is consider the vital importance of a universal, high-quality public realm. In other words, cities should do the opposite of what Sarasota did when it removed the benches downtown. Provide ample, inviting places to gather in public. Ensure that your park system is well maintained and well used, and engage the community in creating programming for underused spaces to draw a diverse swath of your city’s residents to the space. Don’t skimp on providing public restrooms where they are needed. (This does not need to break the budget, as the experience of Medicine Hat, Alberta, shows. But in America, we tend to overthink and overcomplicate the process.)
The goal is that your public realm will be so well used and enjoyed, by rich and poor alike, that the negative externality of the minority of people suffering some personal dysfunction will be muted. Policing can be part of this strategy, but “mean” approaches that inflict extreme cruelty on a few while not improving the public realm for the many cannot solve the problem.
Arresting those sleeping on the streets, cycling them in and out of jail or levying fines they almost certainly can’t pay is not any sort of effective response to the problem. It’s not even a Band-Aid for the problem; it’s more like vaguely dabbing at an open wound with a tissue. City leaders who want to be humane and do right by their residents (both housed and unhoused) will turn their attention to a much more productive set of responses.