Solving Homelessness: Gregg Colburn
February 16th, 2023
”We need massive, massive construction of housing.”
Gregg Colburn is the co-author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain US Patterns. He's also an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. We discuss the prevalence and variety of homelessness and the big ideas to tackle the housing crisis.
About 5% of the population in the US will experience homelessness at some point in their life. Housing costs, and other structural factors drive homelessness. Hence, the easiest path to providing greater support for low income households would be through an expansion of the federal government’s housing voucher program. In the long run, the best response to this crisis is building much more housing.
Follow Gregg on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ColburnGregg
Follow Mila on Twitter:
Follow Future Hindsight on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/futurehindsightpod/
Love Future Hindsight? Take our Listener Survey!
http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=6tI0Zi1e78vq&ver=standard
Want to support the show and get it early?
https://patreon.com/futurehindsight
Sponsor
Thanks to Shopify for supporting the show! Go to shopify.com/hopeful for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today.
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Gregg Colburn
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
-
Gregg Colburn Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
This week we're tackling one of our society's trickiest and I would argue, most shameful, challenges: homelessness. Misconceptions about those who are unhoused are deep and prevalent and prevent us from considering policy choices that could actually make a difference. Look at any mayoral race in any major city in the US in the past few years, and homelessness and how to tackle it have been one of the top issues. Existing policies and programs are obviously inadequate, and nothing ever seems to stick.
Here's a quote from today's guest: "If you understand homelessness as a housing problem, we can also understand it as solvable."
Our guest today is Gregg Colburn, co-author of Homelessness Is A Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns. Gregg is an assistant professor of real estate in the University of Washington's College of Built Environments.
Welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us. Gregg Colburn: [00:01:36] Thanks, Mila. Great to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:38] So to get us started, I'm going to ask a simple question: What is homelessness and who are the unsheltered?
Gregg Colburn: [00:01:47] Well, we have to go to the federal definition if we want to answer it in a US context. And I think it's important for your listeners to understand that different countries define homelessness differently. But in the US, people who are homeless per the federal definition would be those people who are living in unsheltered
locations, and that would be on the street, in a park, in a tent, in a car, places not fit for human habitation. And then people also residing in homeless shelters are also part of the federal definition of homelessness. And so the unsheltered folks would be outside of shelter. The sheltered population would be in shelter. People who are couch surfing. If I'm sleeping on your couch because I've had a run of bad luck and you have been kind enough to to let me sleep in your basement. I'm not homeless per the federal definition, although in other countries I would be considered homeless.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:30] Right. While we're setting the table here, help us understand the scale of the issue. And I think that'll probably get at the numbers of like who's getting counted by the federal count and the people who are not counted but really don't have a home because they're sleeping on somebody else's couch. So help us understand the scale of the issue. Numbers can become numbing, but I'm hoping you can walk us through a few statistics to help us in this conversation.
Gregg Colburn: [00:02:53] Sure. Each January, so just very recently here, each jurisdiction in the country counts. They do an estimate of the homeless population and then the US Department of Housing and Urban Development publish that number on an annual basis. And so that number has been running between 550 to 600,000 people on any given night. We know from all sorts of research and analysis that that is likely an undercount because finding people who are unsheltered is a difficult exercise. And we have other data sources to suggest that a more accurate figure would be in the millions, not the hundreds of thousands. And that's also at a single point in time. And so over a year, people cycle in and out, over five years, over a lifetime. I was just reading some research on lifetime prevalence of homelessness in the United States, and it's about 5% of the population will experience homelessness at some point in their life, which is a pretty dramatic statistic.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:41] So there is a little bit of nuance when we think about the homeless. Like you said, there are some people who are couch surfing and there are some people who are actually living outside permanently or not so permanently. Sometimes they go into shelters, sometimes they go back out. What's the difference, really, between street homelessness and the folks being shuffled through the shelter system?
Gregg Colburn: [00:04:02] There's a pretty profound difference between sheltered and unsheltered homelessness in the sense that if you are residing in a homeless shelter, at least for that night, you have a place to sleep and you'll have a bed. And it might be a bunk bed, it might be a cot or a mattress on the floor, a cot on the floor. And many of those shelters are not 24/7. So you would enter in the evening and you would sleep there. You might get a meal. And then at six or seven in the morning, you're out and you take all your belongings and then you're out on the street during the day and then you get back in line, trying to get in the shelter that evening. Some have moved to 24/7 service because there's a great recognition that that's a very difficult way to go through, to go through life. The people who are not within the shelter system are residing 24/7 in their car or in a tent or in an encampment or on a park bench, which is obviously a very, very difficult life circumstance. There's a really big difference between the East Coast of the United States and the West Coast, the United States, in terms of that breakdown, which I think is important for your listeners. New York City was really the first jurisdiction to create a very robust shelter system, and that was driven through litigation. Since that people sued and said, I have a right to housing, and ultimately the courts agreed with them. And so New York has the largest homeless population in the country in terms of absolute count, but the vast majority of those people are reside within shelter. 96-97% was the last number that I saw. And so, walking around New York, I hear this all the time in Seattle, "I was just in New York City and I didn't see any homelessness." I said, "Well, there is unsheltered homelessness. And I was just there. I did see some unsheltered homelessness, but it's nowhere near the scale of the West Coast, Seattle, San Francisco, L.A.." The reason is, is that we have not constructed robust shelter systems on the West Coast and therefore, let's say it's a 50/50 relationship between unsheltered and sheltered homelessness. Therefore, when people from the East Coast travel to Seattle, they'll say, "What is going on here? I cannot believe the scale of the problem." And I say on a relative basis we have the same number of people experiencing homelessness. You just hide them better than we do.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:50] Right, Right. I think that's one of the important things to note. Like you said, that, you know, we in New York really only see kind of like the tip of the iceberg on a daily basis. And we do see them on a daily basis, but it's sort of hidden from view. And I think when we talk about homelessness being, quote, cleaned up, that's really what most people want to do. They just want to take the homeless out of view, but they don't actually want to solve the homelessness problem, which is to find
housing for everyone. So you wrote this book to compare rates of homelessness between cities in order to bust some of the biggest myths about homelessness. So let's tackle some of those myths. Is it an economic problem, a poverty problem, a case of individuals making bad choices?
Gregg Colburn: [00:06:37] Yes. If you walk down the street and ask people, you know, what causes homelessness, the three most likely answers you would get would be poverty. And that's intuitive. Obviously, if you don't have money, you're far more likely to experience homelessness, drug abuse, and mental illness. And we certainly if you were to come visit us here in Seattle, you would see lots of people with behavioral health disorders on the streets. And so those experiences obviously cause us to reach these conclusions. And we know from research that those conditions do increase the risk of an individual experiencing homelessness. So poverty does cause homelessness, drug use does cause homelessness, mental illness causes homelessness, or as a risk factor, might be a better way to put that. But what's interesting is that the community level, those don't explain why Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. have the highest homeless populations in the country. It's not the disproportionate presence of people with those conditions in those cities that has created the homeless population. And so that was one of the reasons why my co-author and I wanted to write this book was really to dispel the myth that this is just because we have lots of lots of drug addicts in Seattle. We have a homeless problem. And the answer to that question is categorically no. There are drug users, there are people experiencing mental illness in every jurisdiction and every city in the country. The consequences of those conditions are different in different places. And to get to the punchline when housing costs are high, it creates very little margin for error. And people who are vulnerable in some way, shape or form slip through the cracks. And that produces huge homeless counts in these coastal cities.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:04] Right. Right. The consequences of being in a vulnerable category are very different in a place like New York City or in Seattle or a place like Cleveland. So, in fact, it seems that high income inequality seems to have a close correlation with high rates of homelessness. In many affluent cities, homelessness can be prevalent. So how does that work?
Gregg Colburn: [00:08:26] One of the biggest head scratchers in all of this analysis, and I always get an interesting response when I present this when I'm giving talks, is we know that poverty causes homelessness, right? I would never suggest otherwise. But when you look at the most impoverished cities in the country, Detroit being the most impoverished city in the country, they have far lower rates of homelessness than very affluent places like Seattle and San Francisco and New York and Boston. And so that is a tough one for people to wrap their head around. And what we would say in the academy is that the the reason for that disconnect is we have different units of analysis when we focus on the individual. These vulnerabilities certainly are risk factors for homelessness. But at the community level, those individual factors don't drive homelessness. Structural factors do -- like housing costs. And so the reason why Detroit, with all of its people below the federal poverty line, doesn't have a homelessness problem is because housing is accessible. They're able to find housing, maintain that housing, and therefore, you know, they don't have the same problems that rich cities do.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:25] Mm hmm. Yeah. So I just wanted to underline this. I loved the story you told in your book about one of your teaching tricks when introducing some of these issues to your students, and it involves the real estate website, Zillow. Tell us that story.
Gregg Colburn: [00:09:39] Yes, I'm actually teaching that, the course that I referenced in the book, right now in the winter quarter, and it's an urban economics class. The purpose of the class is really to help students understand why cities exist and why some are big and why some are small, and why land is more expensive in Manhattan than it is in Topeka, Kansas, and all those types of issues. And so when we start to talk about housing markets, it's interesting with undergrads because they've never been really out in the housing market. They don't really have a sense. And so I'll say, well, according to Zillow, you know, the average price for a home in Seattle is $780,000. And they say, "well, that seems like a lot." And I said, "Yeah, it is. And so what do you think it is in Cleveland?" And I pull up the same estimate to myself and I say, "shout out your answers." And they'll say, "200,000, 250,000, 150,000, 300,000!" And I'll say "you're all wrong. You're way too high." And when I was writing this, was, I think, 2019, I think the answer was like $60,000. And they're just, they just can't believe it. They absolutely can't believe that you could get a house for $60,000. And then I said, "Now, what do you
think San Francisco is?" And San Francisco is double what what Seattle was at that point. And so it really highlights like the massive difference in housing costs around the country. And it really has to do with kind of the economic vitality or or lack thereof in some cases of these various communities.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:50] Right, Right. Well, so often the solution offered to homelessness in those major cities with high income inequality is affordable housing. We talk about affordable housing a lot. So what does that actually mean? Because it's a term that's thrown around a lot and in fact, doesn't seem to exist very much.
Gregg Colburn: [00:11:13] Yeah. I'm actually with a colleague writing a book on affordable housing right now. And one of the challenges that we have and we spend the first chapter doing that is defining what affordable housing is because people don't know. And so what I say to people is I live in affordable housing. Right. It's housing that is affordable to me. And so affordable housing is a relative term. It's relative to the financial capacity of that particular household. And so we need to be thinking about what housing is affordable and for whom. When we talk about affordable housing, people's minds will immediately go to Cabrini-Green in Chicago right, a notorious public housing project. When we think of of affordable housing and yes, that was designed to provide housing that was affordable for people with low incomes. But there's all other sorts of mechanisms that we can do, to do that. And in some cases in Detroit, a lot of it is just naturally occurring, right? There's just housing that exists in the private market that's affordable for people making more modest incomes. And so then we have to kind of figure out what are we looking for when we're talking about homelessness, we're talking about people with very, very low incomes, let's say 0 to 30% of the area median income. And so the tools that we have to provide housing for them almost always involve some type of government involvement because the private market in a place like New York City or Seattle cannot construct housing that is accessible to people with those levels of income if the developer or owner wants to make any money. And ultimately that's what developers are doing there. This is a free market economy and they're looking to make money through developing real estate. And so there's a role for the public sector is what I always say. And and we can either do that by constructing housing that's publicly financed and then provide that to people with low incomes. We can give people vouchers which allow them to go into the private market and access housing that would be unaffordable Without the benefit of the voucher. We can pay
people more. We can give people cash assistance. There's all sorts of mechanisms we can use. And in reality we have kind of a smorgasbord of those options now, but they're insufficient. And so that's ultimately what we have to confront, is in cities that are expensive, what are we saying to people who have very low incomes? What are we saying to service workers who are making a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, which is $30,000 a year if you work full time, and that's nowhere near enough money to be able to live in this city. And so what is our societal response to that? And that's where we're struggling right now. And we're wrestling with that very question every day.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:24] Mm hmm. Well, you make the case that we need to de- commodify housing, and I kind of feel like maybe the best way to get at this is to think about, or you wrote about this in the book, about reducing homelessness in veterans. Tell us a little bit about that.
Gregg Colburn: [00:13:39] So one of the pushbacks I'll get is I'll give this talk and people will say, "Oh, you have these nice graphs from your book and it tells a neat, tidy story. But how do you know that if you actually provide housing to people it will end homelessness?" That's a fair question. And my response to that is, is because we have actually done it in this country. And so if we take a brief step back in history, when in this case it was largely men who served in the Vietnam War came back to the United States in the 1970s, that population was disproportionately represented in the homeless population, lots of PTSD, lots of mental illness and behavioral health challenges. And I think the country felt a little guilty and bad about how it had treated its veterans who had come back from war. And so, fast forward a couple of decades and we go to war in Iraq. We go to war in Afghanistan, and we have men and women coming back from tours of duty. And leaders of both political parties made the decision that they didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the past. And they then said, let's make sure that we don't have the same problem of homelessness among our combat veterans.
Gregg Colburn: [00:14:37] And so what did they do? They provided resources and political will to ensure that veterans got housing, and in some cases that was a unit. Here's a unit. You need a unit and you need supportive services. In some cases it might be a voucher, which is all you really need is access to housing. And with that voucher, you'll be off to the races and be just fine. And so some combination of of supports allow the United States to cut veteran homelessness by 50% in a decade from 2010 to 2020,
which is a remarkable achievement. And so, you know, when people push back and say, how do you know it's going to work? I say, well, because it did work and this is the logic that we applied. So the real question then becomes is, will we extend that logic? Will we extend that type of programmatic intervention to a population of people who didn't serve in the armed forces? And that's really a question of values and ideology and and political will and politics. And that's, that's where we're stuck right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:32] Mm hmm. So, well, you argue, right, that we need to be thinking about housing differently instead of a solely private good. We should be commodifying housing. And by that, I think you're saying that at least some of our housing needs to be taken out of the marketplace. So how would you achieve that?
Gregg Colburn: [00:15:47] Yeah. So de-commodification is a term that sometimes gets people nervous because it has its roots in the writings of Marx who talked about the commodification of life. And that was one of his critiques of the capitalist system in the sense that people were really reliant on the private market for their existence. And so the notion of de-commodification has been used by all sorts of scholars over the years to demonstrate that there are certain things that we can get outside of the market. So in the United States, our public education system is de-commodified, right? My kids go to public school and they're allowed to do that because we live in the United States. And so it doesn't necessarily have to have these kind of scary images of of the Soviet Union. It's just some things we deliver through the private market, some things we deliver through public mechanisms. And so when we get to housing, when you think about all the housing supports we have in the United States, still about 96-ish percent of housing is privately procured, which means that, you know, a relatively small segment of the population gets support when in fact we have 15% of the population experiencing poverty. Right. So there's a whole bunch of people who are below the federal poverty line who get no support for housing from the United States. And so the argument about de-commodification is just saying maybe that percentage should be a little higher in the sense that the government has its hands on a greater percentage of the housing stock, such that people can, you know, be able to access some of that housing as opposed to being reliant on the market for their really viability, you know, in terms of being able to function in life.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:11] We are taking a break to thank our sponsor. And when we come back, we discuss building more housing, vouchers, and other solutions.
But first [cha-ching] hear that? It's the sound to start selling on Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform, revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're selling scented candles or fine art prints, Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Shopify covers every sales channel from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform. It even lets you sell across social media marketplaces like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Packed with industry leading tools ready to ignite your growth, Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand without having to learn any new skills in design or code. And thanks to 24/7 help and an extensive business course library, Shopify is there to support your success every step of the way. Shopify makes selling simple so you can put yourself and your ideas out there, whether your thing is making e-books or earrings. Shopify makes your success possible. Making your idea real opens endless possibilities. I love how Shopify makes it easy for anyone to successfully run your own business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/hopeful to take your business to the next level today. shopify.com/hopeful.
And now let's return to my conversation with Gregg Colburn.
So, we also need to build a lot more housing, period. How much more? What are we talking about here?
Gregg Colburn: [00:18:57] Well, you know, it depends on -- This is very geography dependent. There are arguments on all sides here. There are some who will say, "Gregg, you just want to build market rate housing and you think the problem is going to go away." And I'm very clear that I don't think that that's the case. I think we need government involvement. I also think that government involvement of affordable housing is also not sufficient because we need so much more housing in our coastal cities. And so in our region -- I can speak to our region a little better just because I'm here every day -- You know, we have a massive deficit. We need 700, I think was the last number, 700,000 housing units over the next 30 years based on the projections for our region. So this is not like nibbling around the edges. We need massive, massive construction of
housing and a lot of that is going to be market rate housing. But in addition to that market rate housing, we also need a commitment, ideally with support from the Feds, but if not, from the state and local government, to ensure that some portion of those hundreds of thousands of units are affordable for people with lower incomes.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:51] Mm hmm. Well, this is all pretty big stuff between, you know, the absolute dollars to be spent and doing vouchers and doing all of these different things. Is there a way of basing it in an existing program so that we can better understand it as a listener?
Gregg Colburn: [00:20:08] Yeah. So probably the easiest path to providing greater support for low income households would be through an expansion of the housing voucher program. And so the housing voucher program was created, you know, a few decades ago when we stopped constructing public housing. The idea was, let's let the private market build housing and then we'll give people vouchers to access that private market housing. And so we have about one in five people who are eligible for housing support actually get a voucher. And so four of the five people go into a waiting list and they might wait ten years for a voucher and then they're just left to access the housing in the private market, which is terribly expensive if you're a low income household. So there have been a lot of arguments at the federal level saying let's expand voucher capacity in the sense of making it an entitlement like food stamps or SNAP, as we now call it. If you are eligible for SNAP, you get it. There's no waitlist. It's just everyone gets it. So the five out of five households that are poor are getting food stamps and one out of five are getting housing support. And so if we were to make that an entitlement, then you have millions and millions and millions more people, tens of millions of people getting vouchers in the United States, which would really help. Right. It would increase the purchasing power of low income households in the housing market. The challenge is, is that that is not a silver bullet in a place like Seattle or San Francisco, where housing is scarce. Right. Because we need the housing capacity, the housing stock in order for people to use those vouchers. And we know that in cities like New York and San Francisco and Seattle, it's hard to use vouchers sometimes. You know, people will return them unused because they can't find a unit. And so if I had a magic wand, what I tell people is I would expand voucher capacity at the federal level and then I would make sure that jurisdictions like California and Washington and New York State are
doing what they can to ensure that there's sufficient housing stock. If you combine those two actions, I think you can really put a dent in this problem.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:48] Mm hmm. Well, I think we need to talk about zoning here, so maybe could you talk about sort of places that are difficult with having enough housing stock for a place, for example, like in Manhattan, there is no place to build, right? So and also in L.A., there are other problems with zoning. But I think when you talk about Seattle and L.A., you talk specifically about single family zoning. Can you talk about that a little bit and give a little bit more context?
Gregg Colburn: [00:22:12] Sure. The way I describe the housing crisis on our coast is you have rapid population growth, which has been true for these cities because of their dynamic economies and in many cases, natural beauty that draw people there combined with housing stock, that is to use an economic term, inelastic, which means as prices go up, we don't build enough housing. And so when you don't build enough housing and people keep moving to that community, what you end up with is a supply demand mismatch. And that's really what we have in each of those cities and the reasons why supply is inelastic in places -- and San Francisco is the most inelastic housing supply in the country. The first reason is topography. If you have mountains and water, it's hard to construct more housing. And so, you know, you think about New York City and San Francisco. Water is is prevalent in Seattle. We have water and mountains. And so it's really hard to to expand your housing stock compared to Topeka, Kansas. Right. Which is flat as a pancake and you can sprawl and much easier. So that would have a much more elastic housing supply. And then the second input into supply elasticity is the regulatory environment. And there are places where it's easier to build for regulatory reasons and other places that are much harder. San Francisco is the hardest place to build housing in the United States from a regulatory standpoint. And a friend actually just sent me a piece from Twitter, which said that the average time to get a permit to construct housing in San Francisco right now is over 700 days. So they have a massive housing crisis and it's taking them two years to permit a building to construct housing. That's a problem. Now, is regulation important? Absolutely. Like, I want my food, you know, to be safe. Right. And there're regulations around that. That's important. I want to make sure our housing is safe, that it's not crumbling. I want to make sure that we're being good stewards of the environment. All of that is important. But two years to construct housing in a place that has a massive housing crisis, I think
most reasonable people can agree, is is not helpful. And one of the key inputs into that regulatory regime is land use. And, you know, I always use the example and I lived in New York when I was right out of undergrad. People defend single family housing in places like Boston and San Francisco and Seattle. And I always say like, tell me about the single family zoning in Manhattan. And like, well, they don't have any. Right? Like if you propose single family zoning at 88th and Broadway where I lived, people would laugh at you. Yet in every other city in the country, it seems perfectly acceptable that you can live within a five minute drive of the urban core and have a single family home. And that's a complete outlier globally speaking. You know, you go to Asia and you go to Europe. That's not the way people are living, Right? You know, I always say to people in Seattle, "we're a global city now. Like it or not, Amazon, Microsoft have made us a global city. Our built environment needs to start to look like a global city." And so, our zoning, our land use, 75% of our residential parcels in Seattle are zoned single family right now. And we have had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people move here over the last five and ten years because of our tech boom, and we're jamming them all into 25% of these parcels. The math doesn't work. And so ultimately, to respond to the population growth demands in these cities, our land use has to change. And that means that kind of exclusive single family zoning isn't going to work and it's going to change. And I always joke that it can change either gracefully or it can change kicking and screaming, and the evidence would suggest that it's going to be kind of a kicking and screaming process, but it's going to change because it has to.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:24] Right. Right. Well, I want to circle back to where we began our conversation with folks in the shelter system and unsheltered folks. What are the tensions between short term or crisis response and what we've just been talking about, which is affordable long term, permanent housing? How do those systems interact?
Gregg Colburn: [00:25:44] Yeah, there were a bunch of elected leaders in this conversation I was in, this morning here in Seattle, and I joke that one of the reasons why I'll never run for mayor on a West Coast city is because this short versus long term tension is so difficult. And and so, again, you know, I talked about the East versus West Coast split in terms of response here. This is really important when we talk about kind of the immediate response here. So in in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, you have a massive unsheltered homeless population that is in essence, kind of wreaking havoc on the city. It's unpleasant. It's a public health, it's a public safety risk,
all sorts of of issues. And so elected leaders are confronted with the decision of how do I take care of this crisis that is burning right in front of me. Many people have said, let's build a huge shelter system, in essence, New York 2.0. And the issue with that decision is if you walk around New York and say, are you happy with the shelter system, people may say yes, because it's hiding people experiencing homelessness. But it's a terrible experience for people in shelter. And it costs the city of New York billions of dollars year after year after year. It's been going for 25, 30 years. And so what I say to people in Seattle, in San Francisco and L.A., is be careful what you ask for. Is that really what you want? Is is kind of replicating the Boston, New York model on the West Coast. If the answer to that question is no, then you have the other issue of, well, the best response to this crisis is long term in nature in terms of constructing housing. And if I'm going to be elected on a two or four year cycle and and people are urinating on the street and shooting up drugs, I'm not going to get re-elected. And so what do we do in the short term if we're not constructing emergency shelter while we're doing this kind of long term solution? And that's why this is so, so terribly difficult. And I wish I had a better answer. The reality is we have to do both. There has to be a crisis response, but at the same time, we have to be building in the long run and that takes political will and resources and all those things that at times seem to be in short supply.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:35] Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's it's really a difficult problem. So to your point about New York, our approach to homelessness here feels really piecemeal. Try to get more shelter beds, add a few more affordable apartments to big development projects, send some outreach teams. And obviously it's it's not really going to be enough. And one of the things that really struck me in your book is the scale of your ambition. You want to tackle public perceptions of homelessness. We've talked about that. You want to make sure there is enough funding for the needed programs and investments. And we've talked about that. And you want to apply an all of the above systems approach to getting it done. And crucially, you say all three of these things need to happen in unison. And so, I suppose I'm asking sign me up for a less piecemeal and a more comprehensive overhaul, but do you truly believe it's possible?
Gregg Colburn: [00:28:35] Oh, that's a good question. Do I truly believe it's possible? Is it possible? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible under the current political constraints? I might have a different answer for you. I will say there is an opportunity in crisis. And I would say that five years ago there was no chance this going to happen. I will tell you
that that the conversations in Seattle have changed dramatically in the last five years because of the scale of the crisis is what it is. And so while it's really unfortunate that we wait to have such a crisis that exacts a huge human toll before we act, it does get people's attention not just elected leaders, but community members as well. And, you know, housing and homelessness is the top two issues in the state of Washington right now. That has never been the case. It's been transportation. It's been, you know, the economy, jobs, whatever. And so that focus allows us to think much bigger than we did previously. Do I think it's likely that New York City and Seattle are going to build hundreds and hundreds of thousands of units and a homelessness in the next couple of years? No, I don't. But I do think that the scale that we're talking about could change. And that's going to be exciting to see. And, you know, LA just passed $1,000,000,000 homelessness funding initiative a couple of years ago, and I was at UCLA this fall and people said, "well, it's really unfortunate that that didn't end the crisis." And I said, "Well, you've got a $50 billion problem and you put $1,000,000,000 towards it." And so is that billion dollars important? Absolutely. Did that billion dollars help people? It most certainly did, but it's nowhere near sufficient. And so, you know, that's where we end up in this conversation of of how many zeros are we going to put on on these investments that we need to make? And I think the likelihood of more zeros is much greater now than it was before, because people are so frustrated with with the crisis and they you know, they really see this having a material impact on on the viability of of some of these cities.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:17] Mm hmm. Well, one of the things that you also mentioned in your book is that building houses hasn't become faster or cheaper in a way... Like technology didn't help housing. And so if you think about this as a comprehensive problem and we're doing all three things, you know, we're changing people's hearts and minds. We understand the problem is, you know, structural as opposed to a personal. And we're investing both in shelter but also in long term. And let's say we have all the money. We decide we're going to do this. How long do you think is it going to actually take if we're doing everything to tackle this problem?
Gregg Colburn: [00:30:49] Well, I would say in cities like San Francisco and New York, this is a decades-long issue. You know, even with the resources and massive changes in land use and all that, it's it's going to take a while. But it doesn't need to be more than decades. I mean, this isn't a 100 year problem. If we, if we have all of that. I do think
that the technology and the construction of housing is a really important issue in the sense that if we're going to build denser cities, which, you know, we have to. Manhattan is already dense, but Seattle, San Francisco, L.A. can become much more dense. We want to think about how we do that, how do we do that more efficiently? How do we do it more cost effectively? Right now, it's way too expensive to construct affordable housing, way too expensive. Six, seven, $800,000 a unit that just doesn't work. And so I think there's some promising technologies out there in terms of we don't need to just put up, you know, two-by-fours and then put siding on and then put a roof on, which is exactly what we've done for the last 40 years. And so modular technologies and some of these other innovations certainly could help us construct more housing more quickly and more affordably. And I think that's a key input into this big scale response that that is necessary.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:52] Mm hmm. Well, we are a show about civic engagement. And so if we are a believer, and I am, that the problem of homelessness can be solved with housing, what are two things an everyday person can do to advance this?
Gregg Colburn: [00:32:08] It's a great question. I might give you three things if that's okay, but.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:14] Go ahead.
Gregg Colburn: [00:32:14] The way that I respond to this is: really tough, kind of sticky public issues require people to attack them from a variety of different angles. And so some people say, you know, "I donate to a local food kitchen and I donate socks to people experiencing homelessness. And it feels like it is woefully inadequate to the scale of problem." And I say, "yes, but you're making a material difference in someone's life. You should continue doing that. Absolutely." And there are people who are out, you know, serving and supporting people on an individual basis and they really excel at kind of that micro level work. Yes, continue to do that. I happen to be someone I think about this more structurally and I think about the big picture issues. And we need people doing that as well. And so for the average listener, you might find yourself in one of those camps or the other and I would say go where kind of your heart or your mind leads you and where you feel like your skills and talents and resources are best applied. From a structural perspective, I will say voting matters and who you vote for matters. And there
is material differences between candidates and political parties on housing. And I would I would encourage people to educate themselves on that and figure out which candidates are more aligned with your your view. I think that's super important. I would say the other thing, and we didn't quite get into this but I think it's really important, the local politics around housing are incredibly difficult. People fight tooth and nail to preserve the character of their specific neighborhoods, and that is a major impediment to changing our built environment. And so for people who want to be civically engaged, you know, going to public meetings, neighborhood meetings, when they're going to build an apartment building and say, yes, we need this apartment building is incredibly valuable because there're going to be ten other people there saying, I don't want this apartment building here. I don't want those people here. I don't want the increased traffic. I don't want whatever it is. And that is a way to make a huge impact on this, because ultimately, these micro decisions we make from neighborhood to neighborhood, when you magnify them at a national level, produces a huge housing deficit because our neighborhoods are just opposed to the construction of multifamily housing. And so that's a real important way to engage. And it speaks to kind of the civic problem, the small d - democratic problem we have in terms of how we manage local politics in the sense that we send a letter out to people in the neighborhood and say, "we're going to put up a multifamily housing development. If you want to talk about it, come here at 7:00 on Tuesday night." Who shows up at 7:00 o'clock on Tuesday night? Generally speaking, older, white, single family homeowners who have a lot of home equity and they have the time because it's not bath time or they're not working a second job or whatever, and they can go to these meetings and say "no." And then an elected leaders say, "well, I heard a bunch of no's or no." And this, and you multiply that over and over, and that's that's where we are. So that would be my long winded answer to to how to engage civically on this particular issue.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:50] No, that's that's great. I mean, we say this all the time, show up to the community board meeting because that's where these things get decided, whether the apartment building should go up and whether you should have multifamily zoning in your neighborhood. So here is my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Gregg Colburn: [00:35:09] Well, I would say two things. One is, the success we've had with subpopulations like veteran homelessness demonstrates that what we are arguing
about housing actually works. So that makes me optimistic because I don't feel like we're on shaky ground, you know, when we kind of bang the drum of housing. So that makes me optimistic because I think there's conviction behind that argument. The second thing that makes me optimistic is the rate of change in terms of the narrative and rhetoric in our coastal cities that this has become front page news in all the major newspapers, as you mentioned. Every mayoral race is talking about this. That attention is an opportunity. And I hope that we convert that passion, some of it's negative passion, some of it's positive passion. But if we can convert that passion into policymaking and resources, I think we can really make a dent in this.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:59] Mm hmm. Hear, hear. I hope you're right. Well, I think you are. I think people are very much paying attention, to your point. They're raising money in L.A. and the mayor, the newly elected mayor, just declared an emergency. So people are definitely going to do something about it. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Gregg Colburn: [00:36:19] My pleasure.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:21] Gregg Colburn is co-author of Homelessness Is A Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns. He's also an assistant professor of real estate in the University of Washington's College of Built Environments.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're going to dig in deeper to the issues of housing and homelessness. We're going to be joined by Leah Goodridge. She's a commissioner of the New York City Department of City Planning and the managing director of Mobilization for Justice. And she's a leading voice in housing justice at the local level.
Leah Goodridge: [00:36:58] Being a tenants’ rights attorney to me is like the equivalent of being an ER doctor and doing the triage. Like you're literally seeing people come in and they're all facing eviction, and everything is an emergency because one minute you might miss one thing and then they get evicted. And you know, you're a lawyer and you have to, you know, follow a whole process. We have legal rules. So it's all extremely traumatic even for the attorney.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:26] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show If you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:38:08] This podcast is part of the democracy group.