Abundance

by Ezra Klein

So what does explain homelessness? The availability and cost of housing. When Colburn and Aldern begin testing these variables, their charts, which had just been masses of disconnected bubbles, coalesce into lockstep lines. As the cost of rent rises, so too does the number of homeless. As the vacancy rate plummets—meaning that the housing market is tight, with too many buyers and too few sellers—homelessness rises. The way to think about homelessness, they write, is to imagine a game of musical chairs. With ten chairs and ten people, everyone will find a chair when the music stops. That will be true even if one of the players is on crutches. With nine chairs, someone will inevitably be left out. That’s when individual life circumstances begin to predict homelessness. If you live in a city with too few homes, poverty and drug abuse and unemployment and mental illness make it likelier that you will be among those who end up without a home. But the cause of homelessness isn’t the poverty or the addiction or the unemployment. All those conditions are far more prevalent in, say, West Virginia than in California, and yet California has six times the per capita homelessness of West Virginia.