[Applause]
-I wanted to welcome you.
My name is Laura,
and I'm so honored to be with you here tonight.
Before we begin the program,
I do want to acknowledge that we here at the Central Library
are on the traditional lands of the Duwamish,
the first people of this area, past, present, and future.
And wherever you are, Seattle Channel viewers,
you are on indigenous land
and I hope that you'll all join me in honoring the land itself
and those who have stewarded the land for generations.
We also want to thank Brian and the Library Foundation,
the Gary and Connie Kunis Foundation
for sponsoring this event.
Thank you to our media sponsor, the Seattle Times
and to the Seattle Channel
for being here to record the event so that folks
who couldn't be here in person
can get access to this information after the fact.
And then finally,
we want to thank Third Place Books for being here
to fulfill all your book buying needs at the end of the evening.
I am so pleased to have Gregg Colburn here tonight,
one half of the amazing duo who wrote Homelessness
is a Housing Problem.
This book and this topic is really near
and dear to my heart.
Here at the Seattle Public Library,
I'm a community resource specialist.
That's library speak for social worker, essentially.
And my job here is not so much as a case manager,
but rather as a resource navigator.
So our team's responsibility is
to think about connecting our patrons with social services,
both within the library and then external to the library as well.
And it probably won't surprise anybody here tonight
that the Number 1 question we get asked is,
"How do I get access to affordable housing?"
And it probably also won't surprise you to know
that we can't really give a good answer to that question.
Here in Seattle,
our ability to fulfill that need is severely lacking.
The availability of shelter and housing
is just far beyond our capacity,
or perhaps our will to fulfill.
And Seattle is certainly not alone in that.
So all across our country,
you can see that cities and counties
are having trouble fulfilling the need for housing
in our communities. One of my favorite ways
to wrap my mind around the idea of homelessness
is an analogy borrowed from another
of my intellectual heroes, Jerusalem Demsas,
who's currently a staff writer at The Atlantic.
When she describes homelessness,
she invokes a game of musical chairs.
So as the game goes on and chairs get removed,
fewer and fewer people can sit down.
Maybe those people are ones who are slower on their feet,
maybe they're shyer or less aggressive.
But now, when you apply that analogy to housing,
you can think about competing, instead, for a place to stay.
And the same rule is going to hold true:
when there isn't enough of something to go around,
people who have more resources,
be that access to information, money,
or social connections,
are going to be more successful than those
who don't have those same advantages.
And this mental picture is just a simple way
for me to explain in my own mind
why certain folks are overrepresented
in our homeless population. Folks who've been historically
and systematically disadvantaged
are not going to have those advantages
that help them gain access to those resources
or to get to that last chair fast enough.
But also looking at who misses out
almost obscures the central question of,
"Why is there so much chairlessness
or why is there so much homelessness?"
And to both, the answer is really the same;
because we just aren't providing enough of a needed resource
Who gets to sit down,
who gets to rent an apartment,
wouldn't matter if we had chairs or apartments enough for all.
And that is the story that this book tells us:
that homelessness is a housing problem.
It's not a poverty problem, it's not a drug problem,
it's not a mental health problem.
It really is a housing problem.
That is what the data that Gregg is here to present to us
tonight -- all of that data adds up to.
That's the argument that they methodically build
over the course of this book. And in doing so,
they really present us not only with the history of the problem,
but also with solutions
that promise to have a lasting impact
on homelessness and equity in America.
And in those solutions,
I thankfully see an antidote to the despair
that threatens to take hold
when we look at the scale of today's crisis.
The authors remind us that just as we made choices
that landed us here,
so too could we make different decisions in the future.
As they write, people design cities and structure markets,
they -- and may I assert,
we, can also do things to change them.
Please join me in thanking Gregg for being here tonight
and sharing his insights with us.
[Applause]
-Thank you, Laura.
And thanks for your good work here at the library.
Thank you, Brian, for the introduction
and the opportunity to present tonight.
I actually hear from libraries all around the United States
since this book has gone out,
I get random emails from lots of people,
some of whom are upset with me,
but a lot of people are just writing to say like,
"I need help."
And the number of librarians who have contacted me
is kind of shocking.
And so the library's system is at the very front
of this crisis,
and they provide an absolutely essential service in our cities
and the people who need it.
So thank you to the libraries for what you do.
So I'm going to spend about a half hour talking
about the key arguments in our book here.
And just to give you a bit of a background,
I'm kind of an odd academic as I say, which then people will say,
"Well, that's not sufficiently descriptive
to describe people in academia
because there are a lot of odd people in academia."
But I come from a background in business.
So I was an investment banker and private equity investor
for about 17 years before I left
and embarked on my academic journey, got my PhD.
And when I entered my PhD program,
I wanted to study housing
because I had been involved in a number of nonprofits
that worked on housing when I was in the private sector.
And so when people say,
"Why do you want to study housing?"
I give really one of two answers,
"Housing and homelessness."
The one answer is just a Maslow argument,
which is we have all these outcomes in society
that we care about.
And I have colleagues at the university who study this;
education, healthcare, labor market, all these things.
Super important.
All of those are compromised if people don't have housing.
And so to a certain extent,
it's fundamental in that if we want kids to learn geometry,
let's make sure that kid is housed, right?
If we want elders to be healthy,
let's make sure they're housed
and then we can worry about high blood pressure
or some other health conditions.
My now friend Margot Kushel,
who runs the Benioff Institute in San Francisco,
she's a physician
and she has gone in front of the legislature in California
and just said, "I'm a physician.
And what I'm telling you is the best thing
you can do for the health of my patients
is make sure that they're housed," okay?
So this is absolutely foundational.
What I meant -- when I get that question,
I meant in maybe a less benevolent mood,
what I'll just say is that I'm outraged
that in the wealthiest planet and the --
wealthiest nation in the history of this planet,
that we allow homelessness to persist at this level, right?
We absolutely have the resources to end this.
We are making a decision not to.
So my family and I moved here in 2017 to begin my work at UDub.
I have some former students here which is pretty awesome.
It's great to see you. So I moved in 2017.
There weren't a lot of people
at UDub studying housing at the time.
So I got invited to all these meetings
to talk about housing and homelessness, right?
And some of you, if you're in this ecosystem,
you've probably been in these meetings.
Everyone talks about what's going on.
And I would leave the meetings and generally speaking,
I was pretty quiet because I was the newcomer
and I was trying to learn my way around.
And I would leave and just say like,
"I don't think we understand what's going on."
We agree that there's a problem
and the problem is getting worse,
but there was really no firm understanding
of what was driving it.
And if you are, you know, a concerned citizen
that's reading the Seattle Times every day
and engaging in the media,
you will understandably be confused
about the cause of this crisis.
There's a different explanation almost every day.
And so as someone who studies public policy,
that really concerned me because this erosion
of confidence of our ability to address this then
makes taking the steps that we need to take even harder.
And it ends in this --
it leads to this kind of vicious downward cycle.
And that really, really concerned me.
And so what I wanted to do was kind of disrupt that.
And I was talking to my friend Kollin Min,
who ran homelessness investments for the Gates Foundation.
And I said, "You know, I kind of want to write this book,
which is basically just to tell people like,
why is homelessness so bad in Seattle?"
And he said, "You should." So I was like, "Okay.
Well, I guess I'll write the book."
And so here it is. Here it is.
And writing a book about homelessness,
I honestly didn't think anyone would read it.
I knew my parents would, even my wife and kids are like, "Yeah.
Whatever. Homelessness." They hear enough of that.
But my parents did read it,
but then a lot of other people read it, too.
And that really surprised me.
It feels great to have people here on a -- what night is it?
Tuesday night -- when you could be doing other things.
And so it gives me optimism
because I've traveled all around the world
talking about this book and people
show up to learn about this
because It's a topic that people are passionate about.
Very few people are kind of agnostic on the issue.
They're either angry about homelessness, they're upset,
their, you know, passions run really, really high.
And so I think that's the first step to fixing this, is apathy.
We don't have an apathy problem, which is great.
So that's kind of the motivation for the book.
And I describe it as a translational book.
We do our own research here,
but a lot of this research we've known for some time,
but it really hasn't made it into the public consciousness.
In essence,
a lot of our understanding about homelessness
is just derived by what we read in the newspaper
and what we observe when we're walking around in the city.
And that's fine.
Our own observations are certainly informative
and we should rely on those,
but there's a lot more going on.
And so I wanted to kind of translate this research
for a general audience.
I've given this talk probably 150 times.
And people ask me, "Are you sick of it?"
And the answer is "No."
Because when people show up and are interested in this,
I actually -- it's engaging for me.
And I enjoy sharing the information with people
because they're interested in this.
What really surprised me though about this is I've been to,
you know, San Francisco and LA and Boston
and New York and Washington DC, which wasn't surprising.
But what's been super surprising
is that I've been invited to Wichita, Kansas,
and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
I've been to Kentucky three times.
I've been to North Carolina four times, right?
I was just in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Friday, right?
There are communities all around the country
that are now dealing with homelessness.
And they're saying, "What in the world is going on?"
And so the talks in those communities
are actually kind of fun because they're problems,
for them it's big,
but it's tiny compared to what we have.
And I'll say, "You can learn from our mistakes.
You can course correct. It's a little bit late for us.
We're knee-deep in this right now."
But Cedar Rapids, you can do something.
And that's fun.
I've recently been in Australia and in Europe
and it's just interesting to see
how different countries deal with this, right?
The problems are different.
The causes are slightly different
because of different political systems.
And so it's been a really good learning experience for me.
So fundamentally,
if you're going to write a book about homelessness,
we have to wrestle with what causes homelessness.
And for those of you
who've been to graduate school in the social sciences,
we spend a lot of time teaching courses on causality.
Causality in the social world is hard
because human beings are complex, right?
All these things come together to produce an outcome.
I've never experienced homelessness,
I've never experienced housing insecurity, okay?
But I've talked to a lot of people who have,
and I can tell you each story that I hear is unique.
It's uniquely tragic.
So I'm not going to stand here and say,
"This is the one causal pathway into homelessness,"
because that would be totally disingenuous, okay?
We have lots of ways of knowing about homelessness.
One of the ways is we ask people experiencing homelessness,
"Why are you homeless?
What happened to cause you to end up in this circumstance?"
And when we ask those questions,
I've been amazed being part of these surveys
is people are very, very honest and blunt,
"My boyfriend beat me up and I ran, and now I'm homeless.
I made some poor decisions.
Got into a fight with my roommate,
she kicked me out, and here I am," right?
And so we honor these explanations
because they're the truth. And we report these things.
And then the Seattle Times gets ahold of them and says,
"Here are the causes of homelessness."
And I kind of go, "Mm."
One of the central problems that I had
when I was conceptualizing this book in my mind was,
"I'm coming in centering the housing market
and there's a woman next to me saying it's domestic violence.
Who am I to say that that's not the case for this woman," right?
And so what we want to do in the book
is to honor both of these explanations.
For those of you who are social scientists,
we have a unit of analysis problem.
We have causes at the individual level,
and we have causes at the community level,
which are actually different.
Both are true, but we have to wrestle with that.
So what we do to kind of highlight this for our readers
is draw a distinction between precipitating
events and root causes, both of which are important, okay?
And to do that, we use the analogy of musical chairs.
So actually, Jerusalem and I,
like when I wrote the book,
she rode up and we talked about musical chairs analogy a bunch.
So what we read in the book is --
and a lot of social scientists have used this,
but this is a slightly different spin on it,
to highlight the difference between a precipitating event
and a root cause.
So 10 friends, 10 chairs,
you got a leader, you know how the game works.
Music starts, everyone walks around;
at some point, they pull one chair out.
Music stops, everyone scrambles for a chair,
and by definition, someone loses.
In this case, it's Mike who was on crutches.
He'd sprained his ankle.
He was unable to move quickly when the music stopped, okay?
So if you were to interview Mike after the game
in a social science sense and say,
"Mike, what caused you to lose the game, to be chairless?"
What would he say?
"I had a bad ankle."
And everyone would've nod and said, "Yeah.
That caused Mike to lose the game."
If we ask a different question, which is,
"Why didn't Mike have a chair?"
Well, it's because we didn't have 10 chairs.
If we'd had 10 chairs, he would've found a chair.
It might have taken longer as he hobbled over on his crutches,
but he would've found a chair, okay?
This is the exact analysis
that we do every single day in our big cities
in the United States.
We walk by someone on the street
and there might be a needle next to that person.
We say, "Of course Joe is homeless.
He's addicted," okay?
"Of course, Mike didn't have a chair.
He had a bad ankle," right?
Instead, what we're missing in that brief analysis
is understanding the structural deficit of housing
that created the conditions
that produce homelessness at high levels
when housing is scarce, okay?
So the other thing I've learned about this is
when you write a book out of homelessness,
you get lots of angry emails, okay?
People will leave my talks or read the book and say,
"You've completely misdiagnosed this, Gregg."
And so what I don't want you to do is leave here tonight
and say that, "Gregg doesn't think that drugs are a problem."
They are, right?
Addiction is a really big problem in the United States,
and it deserves our attention.
It deserves treatment. We have mental illness crisis.
We need to figure out how to treat people
experiencing mental illness.
And we have a massive poverty problem in the United States.
All of these are problems and the literature is very clear
that these are causal drivers of homelessness
at the individual level.
No doubt about it, okay?
But we also know that those conditions exist everywhere
and they manifest themselves as homelessness
in some places like Boston and not others.
We should want to understand why that is.
So the question we pose in the book is,
"Why do rates of homelessness vary so widely
throughout the United States?" So why, for example,
does our city of Seattle have five times
the per capita homelessness of Chicago?
It's a massive difference, okay?
So it's a pretty simple question and we
kind of go through the analysis in the book to answer that.
An argument that a lot of people make,
including the Council of Economic Advisors
for our former president made this argument
that if you have individual risk factors, poverty,
mental illness, and drugs --
you have more people with those conditions,
you'll have more homelessness.
End of story. Makes perfect sense.
Turns out it's not true, okay?
The data does not support that argument.
So this is a book about cities.
This is not a person-focused book.
And this doesn't mean that person-focused
research isn't important.
It absolutely is. It absolutely is.
But what this book is designed to do is to explain for someone
who's walking around Seattle,
"Why is the problem so bad here?
I was just in Indianapolis; it's not like this."
That's what we're trying to answer.
And our thesis is that tight housing markets accentuate
individual vulnerabilities
and produce homelessness at much higher levels.
And these individual factors
that get a lot of time and attention
in the newspaper and at parties
when we're talking about homelessness
are really sorting mechanisms.
They help to identify the people
who are most likely to experience homelessness
when housing is scarce.
So if we're going to write a book about regional variation
in rates of homelessness,
I want to demonstrate for you that, in fact,
we do have regional variation.
The sample in our book
is the 30 largest metro areas
in the United States.
And we have a bureaucratic
complexity here,
which lots of people
writing about homelessness
messed this up.
Some places count homelessness
at the city level
and some count
at the county level.
Neither way is right or wrong,
it's just some different
jurisdictions do things
differently.
You can't compare
cities to counties
because counties include
suburban locations
where homelessness tends
to be less prevalent.
So to do a proper analysis,
we need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
So when we compare cities in our sample
and their per capita rates of homelessness,
what you'll see is we have New York, DC, San Francisco,
and Boston that have about 10 per capita,
10 per 1,000 people; people experiencing homelessness,
and that's about five times Chicago and Indianapolis.
Huge variation.
This isn't 20% difference, 30%,
its five times.
We should want to understand
why that exists.
And if we have a good answer
for why it exists,
we should probably focus there.
We should probably focus there.
In counties, the numbers
are lower because of
the suburban phenomenon,
but again, we've got some problem children.
LA, Santa Clara County, King County,
Multnomah County are about five times Hillsborough,
which is Tampa, okay? I didn't realize going in
that it would be five times for both of them.
That's just a pleasant coincidence.
But anyway, it's a big, big variation.
So what we're going to do in the book is try to explain
why does that variation exist.
We're going to use real simple statistics and test,
"Does this help us understand
why some cities have lots of homelessness?"
If it doesn't, we cross it off and we move to the next one.
And we kind of make our way through the arguments.
I won't go through all of them tonight
because you want to get on with your Tuesday,
but we'll go through enough
to give you a sense of the argument.
So the first of these arguments
are going to be individual in nature.
These are common explanations for homelessness.
So I gave a talk in Bellevue earlier today,
and so I've been talking a lot today,
so my voice is getting a little raspy.
So the first one we're going to start with is poverty.
Of course, homelessness is a poverty problem.
At its fundamental nature, this is a poverty problem.
I would never dispute that. If you are poor,
if you have limited resources,
you're far more likely to experience homelessness, okay?
But what's interesting is when we plot rates
of poverty against rates of homelessness
in cities in the United States,
what we see is kind of a head-scratcher,
which is that there is a relationship,
but it's in the opposite direction
of what we would expect.
Places with really high rates of poverty,
so in the 30, 35,
40s there, this is the percentage of people
below the federal poverty line in a city or county.
What you'll see is that homelessness is higher
in places with really low rates of poverty, okay?
"Gregg, you just told me poverty causes homelessness."
It does at the individual level.
At the community level, homelessness thrives
amidst affluence, not amidst poverty, okay?
The most impoverished cities in the United States,
Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit,
have far lower rates of homelessness
than the wealthiest cities in the United States,
our city, San Francisco, Boston, okay?
So the problem of homelessness in Seattle is not attributed
to disproportionate numbers of poor people.
We actually have, on a relative basis, fewer poor people.
This doesn't mean that poverty isn't a problem.
What it means is that being poor in a really affluent place
has different consequences. We would argue part of that,
and a big part of that is the housing market, okay?
So we can't blame the problem
on disproportionate poverty in Seattle.
All right.
This is when the blood pressure starts to rise for some people.
So if you're feeling that,
you can just take a deep breath, okay?
So this is mental illness.
The data on substance use and mental illness
come from the federal government.
It's better at the state level.
So we actually deviate from the cities right now,
this is all state-level data, but it's the same logic.
What are rates of homelessness
in every state in the United States
compared to their rates of serious mental illness?
And what we see here
is basically no statistical relationship.
There are people experiencing mental illness
in every state in the nation at some,
you know, varying levels of -- varying rates,
and it bears almost no relationship to rates
of homelessness, okay? So Washington, Oregon,
and California don't have disproportionate numbers
of people experiencing mental illness.
The consequences of mental illness here
might be very different than elsewhere,
but it's not that we just have huge numbers
of mentally ill people
that are driving the crisis of homelessness, okay?
This doesn't mean that we haven't dropped the ball
on behavioral healthcare in the United States
over the last 50 years; we absolutely have.
And has that contributed to the crisis?
No doubt about it, okay?
But there are people experiencing mental illness
in many places
that -- and it doesn't necessarily manifest itself
as homelessness as it does in some of our cities.
This is rates of substance use disorders.
Again, for those of you who take statistics,
an R squared of 0.06
is basically a nothing burger, okay?
There are people using drugs and addicted to drugs
in every jurisdiction in the United States,
and it bears almost no relationship to rates
of homelessness, okay?
And so when people get frustrated with me and say,
"Of course this is a drug problem."
I'll say, "Do you think people use drugs in Chicago?"
The answer is yes. What about West Virginia?
The home of the opioid epidemic in the United States.
West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate
in the United States.
Absolute tragedy, okay?
One of the consequences of that drug crisis
has not been homelessness, okay?
And so drugs is, again, an important part of the story,
but if this were fundamentally a drug problem,
West Virginia should have a massive problem
with homelessness, and they don't.
Why?
We would argue because they have access to housing,
and we don't in Seattle.
The other point that is super,
super important in all this is
when we observe someone on the street
who has a behavioral health disorder, we don't know
if that condition was the cause of that person's
experience with homelessness or a consequence, okay?
The research on experiencing homelessness
is hard to read, right?
People are exposed to physical and sexual assault
at incredibly high levels, not being fed,
not getting regular medical care, not sleeping.
And then we're surprised
that people develop behavioral health disorders
or mild disorders become severe after being on the street
for a year or two.
This shouldn't surprise anyone.
So what I've said to a lot of elected leaders is,
"If you want less drug use on the streets,"
which I also would like less drug use on the streets,
"let's get people housed."
We are literally pouring gasoline on this fire,
the behavioral health crisis fire by not housing people,
okay?
Finally, we have massive racial disparities
in the population of people experiencing homelessness, okay?
So does race help us understand this regional variation?
The answer is no.
So how do I make sense of this graphic?
The way I make sense of this graphic
is that race doesn't cause homelessness, right?
If being Black caused homelessness,
then Chicago would have a lot more homelessness than Seattle;
much higher Black population in Chicago than in Seattle, okay?
The way I make sense of this graphic
is that race doesn't cause homelessness,
racism causes homelessness.
Racism helps to identify the people in the city
who are most likely to experience homelessness.
In its 400 years of systemic racism and housing
and criminal justice and education and healthcare
and all these things that have built,
you know, decade after decade after decade
to produce these disproportionalities.
Which is why people of color
are over overrepresented in Seattle and Jackson,
Mississippi, and Chicago, and DC,
and every city in the United States, okay?
So that still doesn't help us to answer, though,
why do we have so much more homelessness than Chicago?
So we're going to keep hunting.
"Gregg, there's something about Seattle,
the things that we're doing that's creating this crisis,
or exacerbating this crisis."
One of the most common ones that I hear,
and this is usually when I'm holding a glass of red wine
at a party,
and someone will lecture me on the causes of homelessness,
this happens a lot, "My best friend has a physics PhD."
And when they hear that, everyone just shuts up.
When they hear I study homelessness and housing,
everyone is like,
"Well, I'm going to tell you what's going on."
I was like, "Well, I'd love to hear it, I'd love to hear it."
"So Gregg, LA is warm, Chicago is cold.
Of course they're going to have a lot more homelessness.
I'd rather be homeless in LA."
First of all, I don't want to be homeless anywhere.
That's the first point.
Point 2 is, you're right, LA is warmer than Chicago,
but you know what else is warm?
Is Phoenix, and Texas, and Florida,
many jurisdictions that are warm
that don't have high rates of homelessness.
You know what else is cold in January
when you count homelessness?
Boston.
They have one of the highest rates of homelessness
in the United States, okay?
So we would love to blame mother nature for this crisis,
but when you look at the data at a national level,
it just doesn't hold up, okay? The second, usually
after I debunk the weather argument at a party,
the next one is,
"Well, if we weren't so generous,
all these people would stop moving here
to experience homelessness," okay?
I've heard this in almost every city in the United States.
Are there anecdotes of people
who have moved to a certain jurisdiction
who are experiencing homelessness?
Of course.
But the data overwhelmingly shows
that this is largely a homegrown problem, okay?
It doesn't stop people from making this argument.
So this is TANF,
which is the primary federal welfare program,
typically for women and children.
TANF came into being under Clinton's
welfare reform in the 1990s.
One of the attributes, or detriments,
depending on one's perspective,
is it gives a lot of control to states.
So states determine the generosity of TANF.
So you end up with stingy states in generous states.
And to be clear, generous states,
it's not terribly generous, right?
But it's more generous than stingy states, right?
Our welfare benefits are pretty limited in the United States.
So we can actually test,
"Are people congregating in generous states?"
Are they saying,
"Boy, it'd be great to be homeless in Iowa
because look at those TANF benefits.
I'm moving to Des Moines."
The answer to that question is no, okay?
We have lots of variation in benefit generosity
and it bears literally no relationship
to their rates of homelessness.
This doesn't mean that generous benefits are bad;
I actually support that.
What it means is that people are not making
locational decisions to move 1,000 miles
because of modestly more improved benefits.
Why is that? Moving is hard.
In the best of circumstances, moving is hard.
In the worst of circumstances,
are you going to uproot social networks
that are essential to your life to move across the country
because of "cheaper housing or more generous benefits"?
The answer is no. The answer is no.
It doesn't stop people from making
the argument all the time.
But we have ample evidence to refute this.
Margot Kushel at UCSF,
she just published this amazing study of homelessness
in California and what they found,
they interviewed thousands of people.
What they found is that 90%
of the people experiencing homelessness in California
are from California, okay?
This requires us to look in the mirror,
and rather than blaming migration,
we need to look in the mirror and say,
"This is a homegrown problem
that we collectively have created over the last 50 years.
And therefore, it's on us to figure it out.
It's on us to figure it out." It's election season.
Let's talk about politics.
How about that?
You haven't heard enough of that in the last couple weeks, right?
So when President Trump was in office,
he accused left-leaning progressives
in West Coast cities for homelessness,
particularly in California.
Governor Newsom of California was not a big fan
of that argument,
and he quickly shot back
and would blame the federal government
for their retrenchment over the last 40 years, okay?
Neither of those arguments,
as we described in the book really hold up,
help to explain this issue.
Trump's argument doesn't make sense because Democrats run
almost every city in the United States, okay?
San Diego, Miami and Indianapolis
I think have had Republican mayors briefly,
but other than that, it's Democrats.
That might be good or bad news.
That's a separate conversation, okay?
But the point is that if just democratic mayors are the cause
of homelessness,
why don't St. Louis and Cleveland and Detroit
and Baltimore have huge problems of homelessness?
They've been run by Democrats for a long, long time, okay?
So this simple analysis doesn't really hold up.
Now, I've met with a lot of democratic leaders
in this state from governor on down
and my point is that Democrats don't get a free pass.
There are plenty of issues
when we look at what's happened over the last 30 years
in the state of Washington, Oregon, and California,
where we have not done probably what we need to do to make sure
that we have adequate housing.
And some of that responsibility falls on people
who've been in elected office over the last three decades.
And many of those people are Democrats,
so they don't get a free pass.
But the idea of just permissive policies
at the local level causing this, that doesn't really hold up.
So what does hold up?
What helps us understand regional variation, okay?
This is the money slide, okay?
No one is giving us a Nobel Prize for this.
This is pretty simple stuff.
Where rents are high, homelessness is high, okay?
Earth shattering news, I'm sure for all of you, okay?
A related variable is rental market vacancy rates.
We know from urban economists
that when vacancy rates get below 5%,
that would suggest that you have insufficient rental housing.
It means you have a deficit of rental housing.
It's like the unemployment rate,
you can never get it to zero because you leave your job,
your chair is empty for a little while
and then someone would replace it.
And you've just got this movement dynamic process
through the market.
There's always someone who's left a job
or is leaving their housing.
You can't get to zero on rental vacancies, okay?
And so what we see is in cities and communities
where vacancy rates get below 5%,
homelessness tends to be high.
And we know there's a causal relationship
between low vacancy rates and high rents.
And so when people push me on this, I'll say,
"Give me a counter example in the United States.
Give me a place with really high rents
and low vacancies that doesn't have a problem
with homelessness."
And then I get a blank stare in silence and I'll say,
"I'll save you the time.
There isn't one." So is it a perfect predictor?
I would never suggest that it is,
but it's pretty darn good
and it's a heck of a lot better answer than anything else
people are talking about at the cocktail parties.
Whether generous benefits, people want to be homeless,
et cetera, et cetera, okay?
This is a much more convincing explanation.
So why do some places have high rents and low vacancies.
If this is really important, what's driving this?
Is this Amazon's fault?
Amazon boomed, hired a bunch of people,
paid them a bunch of money and blew up the housing market.
Certainly part of the story,
it's certainly part of the story,
but it's not the whole story.
Because when you plot population growth in all
of these cities and counties
relative to rates of homelessness,
you find very little statistical relationship.
This really surprised me.
Actually, I ran this the first time on a Saturday afternoon.
I was watching a college football game and I was like,
"Oh, I messed up this analysis."
I ran it again and got the same thing.
I ran it three times.
It's like, "What's going on here?"
So I went into these bubbles
and I realized there's more going on here.
This is not just a population growth story.
We also need to think about the supply of housing.
So some of you may have taken an economics course
at some point in your life and heard this notion of elasticity.
You might be getting heartburn right now.
Elasticity doesn't need to be scary.
It's just an idea of what is the supply response
when the price of a good changes.
If these bottles of water increase in price
by 10 times tonight, what's going to happen tomorrow?
The people who make these are going to make
a whole bunch of them.
We're going to have two shifts, three shifts,
and pretty soon we're going to flood the market with these
because it's a profit opportunity,
and it's pretty easy to increase the supply
of these water bottles.
If the price of housing goes up by 10 times tonight,
what happens to supply in the next couple weeks of housing?
Doesn't change.
Why? It takes a long time to build housing.
We need permit, land financing, labor, materials,
the whole nine yards, okay? So generally speaking,
we don't get an immediate supply response
when prices of housing change.
And we know that the supply response in some cities
is different than other cities, okay?
So urban economics have taught us
that there are two inputs into the supply elasticity
of a housing supply elasticity and community.
One is the regulatory environment.
How easy or difficult it is to build housing.
That varies a lot throughout the United States.
And topography.
If you have mountains and water,
it's harder to build more housing.
If you combine challenging topography
with a really strict regulatory environment,
you're going to have super inelastic housing,
meaning prices can go up a bunch and you don't build much.
San Francisco, California,
it is Exhibit A for an inelastic housing market.
Beautiful mountains, water, right?
Incredibly strict regulations.
We have relatively strict regulations here,
but nothing compared to San Francisco.
We have actually outperformed San Francisco and
housing production meaningfully. We have a long way to go,
but we're not as bad as San Francisco, okay?
When you layer a tech boom on top
of a really inelastic housing supply, you got a big problem.
And that's exactly what's going on in Seattle,
San Francisco, and Boston right now.
It's a vicious, vicious cocktail of factors, okay?
So when we plot cities by these two variables,
and so what I want you to think about the bottom axis,
change of population,
think about that as the demand for housing.
More people, more demand for housing, okay?
The y-axis, the vertical axis is supply elasticity.
The higher those numbers are, you're building more housing.
The lower those numbers are, the less housing you build.
So the upper right quadrant is really interesting to me.
It's Sunbelt cities that have grown as fast as Seattle,
San Francisco, and Boston
but they've not had the same experience
with the housing crisis.
Why is that?
They built a bunch of housing, okay?
The numbers in parentheses
are their rental market vacancy rates
over the decade of the 2010s. They boomed
and maintained relatively high rental market vacancy rates
because they built a bunch of housing.
Now, for those of you who really think about these issues,
you're going to quickly say, "Well, Gregg, be careful."
And yes, the answer is I need to be careful here.
They probably built a bunch of housing through mechanisms
that we wouldn't be overly thrilled with largely sprawl,
right?
They're flat as a pancake and they can sprawl,
and the regulatory regime
there is much more amenable to housing production.
So I'm not necessarily saying
that we should follow the Texas playbook in terms
of housing production,
but what it does show is if you build the units,
it can make a difference.
I would probably argue for a different way
of building the units,
but the point is, the units matter.
The units matter.
The bottom right quadrant
in which we find ourselves is the perfect storm
for a housing and homelessness crisis.
A whole bunch of people move there,
you don't build a bunch of housing and what happens?
Vacancy rates go down, rents go up.
And if you're vulnerable in any way,
it exacts a huge cost on you, okay?
And for Seattle,
the bummer about this
is we watched San Francisco go through this ahead of us, right?
Their crisis predated ours.
We patted ourselves in the back and said,
"We're not that bad as -- we're not as bad as San Francisco."
And now we nearly are, okay? So my lesson, you know --
the lesson that I give to cities in the interior
of the country is, "Learn from our mistakes.
We didn't learn from San Francisco
and now we're in the same mess. You can learn from us."
Growth and prosperity is a good thing.
I'd rather have a growing and prosperous city
than be the mayor of Detroit,
which has been a really hard job for the last 50 years.
But what we've not figured out is how to grow
and prosper and create sufficient housing such that,
one, the new people coming here can find housing.
And second, more importantly,
incumbent residents continue to live here.
When people say, "Well, we didn't build enough housing
for Amazon people in Seattle."
I say, "That's the wrong way to frame this.
They all found housing.
What we didn't do is build enough housing such
that people who have called Seattle home
for the last 40 years can continue to be here."
Those are the folks who haven't been able to get housing.
How many Amazon employees do you know
who are experiencing homelessness, right?
They found housing.
They have resources in this competitive game
of musical chairs, they're winning.
They're winning.
So the data in our book ended in 2019, book came out in '22.
So what's happened since then is a fair question.
Well, one, we had a pandemic that messed up life,
cost a lot of lives.
It also screwed up our data.
And so we have to be really careful.
Both the census data and homelessness data is kind of --
you have to take it with a grain of salt
because of the COVID period.
But there's sufficient data to say a couple things.
One is, generally speaking, the logic of the book holds.
It's still true in our coastal cities,
but it's now holding in more cities.
Phoenix, Sacramento, Austin, Atlanta, Denver,
starting to have housing market dynamics
that look a lot more like coastal cities
and they're getting a lot more homelessness, okay?
Which is why I'm getting invited to places that I would
not have imagined because these pressures are reaching
the interior of the country.
When I was flying to Iowa --
I always pull up the census data
before I talk so I know what's going on.
The rental market vacancy rate for the entire state of Iowa
is 5% right now, which is absolutely shocking.
I would've bet my entire net worth
that it would've been 8% or 9%.
I was stunned when I saw that, okay?
So we have a housing supply and
housing access issue all over the place.
All over the place,
which is why this is being talked about
by both presidential candidates. In my adulthood, I'm 52 now,
I can never remember presidential candidates talking
about housing the way they are right now.
Why? Because there's a problem everywhere.
Which is a good thing, crisis creates an opportunity.
It's just a shame that it took this long to get there.
We should have been talking about this 20 years ago,
and we would've avoided a lot of hardship and pain
and suffering in the process.
So what's our response? Building housing.
"Gregg, building housing takes a long time and it's expensive."
So what can we do instead?
Well, this summer, the Supreme Court wrestled with this issue.
The Supreme Court now said it's law of the land
that we can criminalize homelessness,
okay, in the Grants Pass case, okay?
There's going to be a great temptation,
there already is even in progressive cities,
to start rounding people up.
And we know from the literature that not only is this cruel,
it is unbelievably ineffective.
If someone is having trouble getting a job and housing,
how about we fine them and give them a criminal record, okay?
This is exacerbating an already huge crisis.
And so this is going to be a huge,
huge challenge in the next five or 10 years,
is how do we then think about what our community response is?
And the Supreme Court has given us a green light
to pursue pretty aggressive and, I would argue,
ineffective policies.
We also see at the state level a lot of action,
particularly in the south, around criminalization bills.
This is from Oklahoma.
There was a state representative in Oklahoma
who authored a criminalization bill.
There's a journalist in -- in Oklahoma
who I don't know who apparently read our book
and she was interviewing this legislator and said, you know,
"Representative Weaver,
do you think homelessness is a housing problem?"
And he responded, "Well, it could be, I mean,
it could be if they don't have any place to live," okay?
So even people promoting criminalization
have to acknowledge when forced that,
"Yes, their housing is part of the story here," right.
These people don't have any place to live.
So to wrap up here,
I've actually thought about writing a second book,
which is the reaction to the first book.
It's really been kind of an interesting survey
in human behavior.
I think a lot of reactions are fear-based.
I think a lot of people at their root are fearful
that either they or someone they love
could end up in the circumstance that they end up behaving
or responding in, in pretty harsh ways because of fear.
But what I hear from a lot of people is,
"Gregg, we just spent x million dollars,
x hundred millions of dollars; the problem got worse.
Why are we doing this? Let's stop spending this money."
And it's a fair critique,
but I take issue with it for two reasons.
One is, we're ignoring the scale of the problem.
So yes, we can spend a lot of money,
but if the scale of the problem is 10 times the amount
that we're spending, it's not going to go away.
When I was at UCLA talking there, L.A.
passed a $1.2 billion measure around homelessness.
Massive, biggest one in the United States.
And homelessness got worse, and people were frustrated by that.
And I said,
let's just be really clear about what's going on here.
You have a $50 billion problem in L.A.
and you spend a billion dollars and you're upset
that it didn't go away. Okay.
I support the billion dollars,
the billion dollars, probably saved a lot of lives
and created a lot of housing, and L.A.
is better off because of that billion dollars,
but we'd be foolish to suggest
that that would be sufficient to end the crisis.
Okay.
The second reason
why I take issue with that analysis
of saying we should just stop spending the money is,
a lot of the money we spend in the United States
is a response to the crisis. The shelter system we have,
the services that we have are a response
to the crisis of homelessness.
And I'm grateful we have that,
because it literally saves lives.
But it is in no way meant to prevent homelessness.
Yet we blame that system all the time
for ongoing homelessness in the United States.
If they were better at their jobs,
we wouldn't have all this homelessness, Gregg.
We don't blame ER doctors for people breaking their arms.
The ER exists to take care of people when they're hurt,
and then we take care of them and we send them home.
The shelter is meant to serve someone
when they've lost their housing.
What we've not done is prioritize investments upstream
to prevent all these people from entering the system.
Okay? That's fundamentally a mismatch.
And I'm not suggesting we should stop funding
the crisis response system,
but if that's all we're going to do,
we will just continue to have more
and more people entering the system.
Colleagues in L.A.
have told me they're actually pretty good
at getting people housed.
In the last couple of years
they've housed like 25,000 people in L.A.
Huge success.
The people in that crisis response system
are doing really good work.
At the same time, like 35,000 people entered the system.
So now the overall, the net increase is 10,000 people.
And everyone says, well, this is a failure.
It's not a failure.
The system's actually working pretty well.
The inflow is so extreme that we can't keep up,
so we've got to turn the water off.
This is basically the bathtub with the water coming in faster
than the water is going out.
The water level will continue to rise.
The increasing numbers of people experiencing homelessness is
because that water is coming in too fast.
We just can't get it out of the bathtub.
And so when we start to talk about more housing,
then we get into some of these challenging things,
which is housing's expensive, true.
And creating more housing is sometimes hard
because of local political impediments around land use.
What kind of housing can we build?
Can we build single family?
Can we build multifamily?
I don't want my neighborhood to change, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. This starts to get complicated.
So when I deliver this kind of clean message,
I'm not suggesting for the people who serve in these roles
that this is easy.
If this were easy, we would've done a long time ago.
This is hard work.
I think the diagnosis is pretty easy.
The resolution of it is hard.
Okay. So who should do this? Is this a government problem?
Is this a private problem?
I get accused of being both a shill for corporate interest
and a socialist in the same talk.
Okay.
So I'm going to give you the corporate shill version first,
which is 95 plus percent of housing
in the United States is unsubsidized.
That's the system we've created.
You might like it, you might hate it.
Okay. If we're going to get more housing,
if we're going to build 3, or 4,
or 5 million more units,
a lot of that's going to be built by private developers,
and it needs to be easier and cheaper and faster
for people to build that housing.
I firmly believe that.
And so I think government has a role
to make sure that it's easier for private developers to build.
Gregg, you're a corporate shill, maybe so.
At the same time,
I also want to acknowledge the fact
that a bunch of people won't be able to afford that housing.
And that's not ideology, that's math.
That's just math.
And so as a society,
what is our response to the significant percentage
of the population that can't afford market rate housing?
If the answer is tough,
then we end up with what we have right now,
which is a whole bunch of people who are precariously housed,
who are one unlucky event away from experiencing homelessness.
And so does that mean we need more subsidies
to create affordable housing?
Absolutely.
Do we need more rental subsidies to give people
more purchasing power such that they can afford housing?
Absolutely.
And so I support those initiatives.
I don't believe those are socialism,
but they are public programs.
The public programs are on housing
are pretty limited in the United States,
and we're paying the consequences.
We're seeing the results of those decisions.
Okay.
President Nixon put a moratorium on public housing in 1972,
which is my birth year.
And the public housing stock has done this
over the last 52 years. Okay.
We have vouchers, which are great,
but one in four people who are eligible get them.
Okay.
The rest of those people are coming to the state
of Washington and King County
and the city of Seattle saying, I need help.
I'm getting no help from Washington, D.C.
and housing's expensive.
And so now we have mayors and county execs who are saying,
what am I going to do?
It's tough. All right.
So my hope with this book
was not to take attention away from Joe on the street,
because Joe deserves dignity and attention.
My hope was that by reframing this,
that we don't walk by Joe and say, boy, you know,
I feel bad for Joe,
but Joe made some poor decisions.
We are really good at blaming poor people for the outcomes
that they achieve in the United States.
Okay.
If instead we walk by and I see Joe and I say,
you know, Joe is the consequence of structures
that I, Gregg Colburn have contributed to
throughout my life.
Okay. That's a different message.
And that forces me then to go home at night
and look in the mirror and say, then what am I going to do?
What are we collectively going to do
to deal with the structural conditions
that have produced this outcome? Okay.
And that's scary
because structural problems require structural solutions,
which typically require political will and courage
and resources,
things that are in short supply at times in United States.
It's easier just to blame Joe. Okay.
So the final thing I'll hear from people is, Gregg,
I'm not convinced this is going to work.
We have all sorts of debates
about all these homelessness interventions
and whether in fact they are effective or not.
Okay.
The reason why I'm confident that they're effective
is because we literally just did this.
Okay.
The United States leaders of both political parties
said they did not want to repeat the mistakes
of Vietnam generation.
My dad's generation.
Largely men, came back from Vietnam
and were grossly overrepresented the homeless population.
Okay. It was a national kind of a tragedy, right?
How we treated that generation.
And so we now have men and women
coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan,
and we said, let's not repeat that mistake.
And I 100% endorsed that. And what do we do?
We provided funding and resources
through the VA and through HUD,
and we cut veteran homelessness by 50% in 10 years.
Huge achievement.
How do we do it?
We provided housing and services.
Some people just needed a voucher,
they just needed some purchasing power, and they were fine.
Other people had severe behavioral health disorders
and we provided services and housing,
and now they're stably housed.
So this argument of like, we don't know what to do.
We're not sure this stuff works.
It does, what we've not done is scaled this approach
to a broader population of people.
That's why we're struggling with this problem.
Okay.
So ultimately,
I joke that it's a little bit like talking to a toddler,
but like, if we continue to make the same decisions,
we will get the same results. Okay.
If we continue to make the same decisions
about our housing system
and the policies around affordable housing,
we're going to get the same results.
And my fear is that we're going to look back at 2024 and say,
those were the glory days for homelessness.
This problem could get much, much worse.
And no one wants that. No one wants that.
So we need to think about this differently.
Okay. Is it easy? No.
But we know what the solutions are,
we just need to pursue them and scale them.
So thanks so much for being here.
I look forward to any questions or comments that you have.
And -- -Thank you. Gregg.
Can you tell me a little bit about
how this problem relates to Seattle's comprehensive plan,
if that's something you're familiar with?
-Well, I think the comprehensive plan
and I've been over at city hall working on some other issues,
so I haven't dived into it in great detail.
But generally speaking, how we think about
how our land can be used is super, super important.
So at a really high level,
Seattle is zoned 70 to 75% single family,
which means that it's illegal to build anything other
than single family zoning on three quarters,
roughly speaking of our residential parcels.
Okay.
When you layer a population boom on top of that,
in essence what we're saying is if you want to live in the city,
you can live in 25% of the parcels.
The other 75% are off limits.
That doesn't work. That math doesn't work.
And so when you look at global cities,
United States is a complete outlier in terms of
how we structure our cities.
People get very worried about density in Seattle,
and it's like, have you ever been to Asia?
Right?
You want to talk about density, New York has a density by U.S.
standards, and it's not a dense city in global standards at all.
European city is much more dense than the United States.
And so I understand -- I live in a single family home,
so I'm not disparaging single family homeowners.
But the point is,
is that we cannot be a thriving dynamic global city
and have land use the way we have.
Now, is it difficult to change that land use?
Absolutely.
People with privilege and people who've been here
and they've got a lot of home equity might show up at meetings
on Tuesday night and say, I don't want things to change.
And that's an ongoing battle that we're going to fight.
But will Seattle be denser in 40 years than it is now?
Absolutely, because these changes will have to be made.
And so these incremental changes that we make through land use
and comprehensive plans
and all this kind of stuff are essential inputs
into that change but it's hard. It's really, really hard.
And so I do think that for people in Seattle,
it is absolutely essential
for us to think about the larger picture
when we make decisions
about what our neighborhoods look like.
What I say to people,
and I don't make a lot of friends doing this, is like,
if you're against multifamily housing,
you are for homelessness. Okay.
I don't get invited back to those parties when I say that.
Okay.
-Thanks. Hi, I'm Mark Garrett.
I want to know what you think of this.
So I found a graph on the internet
that showed like the rate of how homelessness in New York City,
and it sort of bumps along.
And then you get to the great recession of 2008
and it just goes up steadily.
What happened? -Well,
New York has had basically the highest rates for a long time.
So I have to --
so we didn't start counting homelessness
in the United States until 2007.
That's the first official count.
And so the numbers pre-2007 may have been estimates,
but it wasn't part of the national count.
So basically we have great recession on.
And so I would need to know what the graphic was
you were looking at,
because I'm not sure where the '90s data would come from.
Generally speaking, you know, we've had relatively --
we had fairly stable rates from '07 through '19
at a national level.
But what we observed in that timeframe
was that the variance increased,
meaning it got worse in our coastal cities,
and it went down everywhere else.
So in essence,
the share of homelessness increased in Seattle,
San Francisco, L.A., Boston, New York, and D.C.
Now coming out of COVID,
what's happened is we're now seeing more of it elsewhere.
It's still a problem on the coast,
and we're seeing more of it elsewhere.
So the number went up 12% last year nationally.
And we know it's a gross under count.
There are all sorts of challenges associated
with counting homelessness.
So anyway, so that's kind of a non-answer to your question.
But when we think about the trajectory
of homelessness throughout U.S.
history, we had lots of homelessness
during the Great Depression, Seattle included.
We had these shanties called Hoovervilles named,
you know, after President Hoover,
and massive homelessness,
which was intuitive because we had 25% unemployment.
Tragic, but it's like, that makes sense.
The modern manifestation of homelessness
in the United States really starts in the late '70s,
early '80s, and people start to see more homelessness.
And it happened to coincide with the late '70s,
early '80s recession.
And the narrative at that point was, well, we're in a recession,
and once the recession goes away, homelessness will go away.
And what happens?
We end up having kind of the Reagan boom of the '80s.
The economy takes off and what happens?
Homelessness doesn't go away.
And homelessness then becomes a fixture of American life
from the '80s to today.
In recessions we had homelessness,
in prosperity we had homelessness,
and we end up seeing lots of homelessness
in our richest cities,
which was a complete head scratcher because in our minds,
we're thinking of 1933,
a bunch of people who don't have jobs
who are experiencing homelessness.
Now we have homelessness, you know, basically,
as I write in the book, you know,
in the shadow of Amazon's headquarters.
It's very different than 1933.
-Are tiny homes an effective way
to increase the housing supply?
-So tiny homes is an interesting one.
I'm of two minds on tiny homes.
Tiny homes are I think a tool in the toolkit,
in the toolbox for homelessness.
I don't believe it's a permanent solution to homelessness
for a couple reasons.
One is it's really not a home,
it's a shed that people are living in.
And might that be better than being on the street?
Absolutely.
And so therefore, I'm grateful that we have that intervention.
One of the challenges
I think we have with tiny homes is what happens
if they're still there in three or five years, right?
And we've taken a parking lot
and we've put some tiny homes on that,
and then for five years people are living in them,
I'm grateful for that shelter,
but what could we have done in five years?
We could have gone up and built 200 units on these parcels.
And so when land is scarce, I'm really interested
in optimizing every single parcel that we have.
And I don't know that tiny homes allow us to do that.
So it's a tool, and as a short-term mechanism,
it's absolutely appropriate. I support it.
But I would caution us to think
that that is the solution to our problems completely.
People disagree with me on that.
So I think there's well-intentioned smart people
on all sides of that debate. That would be my perspective.
-Love your book. -Thank you.
-I'm in a suburb of Seattle,
and this year my city council canceled a apartment complex
that was going to house the homeless.
And as a pro housing advocate, it feels really depressing.
And how can regular people who've read your book and
like, what can we do
when we see our city leaders make these decisions?
Like, do we just mail your book to everyone?
Can we rent you out to city council meetings?
Like what can we do?
-Well, I've gone to a lot of city council meetings in,
you know, like Bend, Oregon.
I spend time with city council.
So I do spend time doing that. I think a couple things.
When people ask me what can I do,
one of the best things you could absolutely do
if you care about this issue
is show up Tuesday night at a planning commission meeting,
which isn't necessarily the most exciting --
well, you're here on a Tuesday night,
so you've already made the decision
to listen to boring stuff on a Tuesday night.
But all joking aside, it has a huge impact.
So the way we make decisions in the United States
about what our neighborhoods look like
is in the name of democracy.
We invite people to meetings on Tuesday night,
and they're usually at seven o'clock.
And we say, we're going to build multifamily housing,
you in the neighborhood are going to be impacted by this.
We'd love to have you here to give us your opinion.
And what happens, who shows up at seven o'clock
on Tuesday night? People who look like me.
The research says they're over 50,
they're White, and they're single family homeowners.
And they disproportionately show up to say, we're not interested.
And the planning commissioner or the city council says,
in the name of democracy, we held this meeting,
six people showed up, and they all said no.
And we do that night after night after night,
city after city, after city.
And then we're like,
why do we have such a screwed up housing system?
Why?
Because we've given so much power and authority
to people who already have more privilege than they need. Okay.
And so one of the problems is, there's a great book,
I won't assign homework, but if you're interested,
it's called Neighborhood Defenders written
by Katie Einstein, who's at Boston University.
She did her dissertation at Harvard,
going to these meetings in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She said, this is what goes on.
So if you've got little kids,
you're not showing up at seven o'clock because it's bath time.
If you're working two jobs, you can't show up.
And if you're not wealthy enough to live in Cambridge,
you're not even invited to meeting.
All these people would benefit from that housing
but they're not there.
And so there's a huge debate going on right now
in policy circles around what does democracy mean
and what does civic engagement mean on these issues?
The way we've done it has not worked.
And so we have to rethink how to do that.
In the interim,
when we're still in the old model,
showing up on Tuesday really, really matters.
And whether that's emails or showing up,
because it's not like there's hundreds of thousands of people
at these meetings.
A few people make a huge, huge difference.
And just to stand up and say,
I'm a single family homeowner
and what I'm saying is we absolutely need more housing.
If I'm 65 years old
and I ever want to see my grandkids in Seattle again,
we better have more housing,
because otherwise they're going to be living in Iowa
because they won't be living here.
And that starts to hit people where it hurts.
And so I'm not opposed to hitting people where it hurts.
And if that's ultimately the mechanism
that we use to get people to support
more multifamily housing, I'm shameless, I'll use that.
Okay.
I hope that you might be driven by the -- motivated by the fact
that people need a place to live, right?
Housing is an absolute human necessity.
And I hope that that would motivate you to think about
beyond just your block or your neighborhood.
But if not, I'm happy to use selfish motives.
And we're seeing this happen.
Like people are recognizing that it's like,
oh, we can't hire a pastor at our church
because they can't afford to live here.
We have a terrible time recruiting faculty
at the University of Washington, right?
They can move to Ann Arbor in Michigan,
triple their standard of living.
Like we love UDub, but not that much.
Okay.
So all of these systems in society
are starting to break down a bit because of housing.
And so all of this --
and homelessness is obviously
the most conspicuous manifestation of that,
but we got a lot of, you know, other issues here.
And so the magnitude of that is growing,
which will force more people, I think, into these conversations.
But it is a fundamental challenge
that we have to wrestle with.
And, you know, those working on the comp plan
and the people at the city,
you know, they obviously are dealing with this every day.
-Hi. I have two questions for you.
The first one is hopefully an easy one.
What do you say about the --
I'm giving you an argument from my father.
Suburb x buys bus tickets for all the homeless people
to send them to big city y whatever.
Does the data show anything about that?
-No. -Cool. Has it happened?
-I'm sure it has, absolutely.
But the overwhelming data would suggest
that that's not the driver of homelessness.
-Cool. The other one is --
-It happens at every Thanksgiving.
So I've been invited to a bunch of Thanksgiving dinners
in the last two years.
Like, would you come to my Thanksgiving to refute my uncle
when he says this?
So anyway.
I have my own plan, so please don't invite me.
But anyway.
-The next question is rent control.
What do you think of it?
-Okay. That is a good one.
I was just talking about this today.
Rent control is one
of the more challenging policy topics in housing.
And there are obvious benefits,
affordability benefits of rent control,
which I am pleased about.
And there's also plenty of literature that shows
when that gets too extreme,
we end up having a negative impact on supply.
Okay.
And so the challenge with rent control and rent regulation,
generally speaking is,
how do we find the right balance of providing
some security to renters
such that their rent isn't going to go up 20% or 30% next year,
which has been happening while also making sure
that we have an environment that entices developers to build.
Is that frustrating? Absolutely.
We created a system that is entirely dependent
on private developers for our housing.
Okay.
You might dislike that and I frankly do as well
but we have to, we desperately need this housing.
So this is a super, super difficult issue.
And so it requires, well, it requires a lot of nuance.
And so generally speaking, I am not a scholar of rent control.
And so I try not to say too much
because I think it requires a lot of analysis
and really a deep understanding.
But generally speaking, that's my position on it.
I see the benefits of that.
And I think there are rent regulations
throughout the United States that make a lot of sense,
kind of anti-gouging.
And then what we have to figure out is
when that starts to get a little tighter,
what are the impacts
and how do we weigh the benefits versus the costs.
And that's why this is hard.
I'd much rather have a whole bunch of housing built
and some subsidies.
That to me is an easier path to affordability
than regulating the private market.
But those things cost money.
And so in the absence of resources to do that,
then this is where we go.
And so when I speak to, you know, I've spoken
to the National Landlord Association talk in Chicago.
And I was eating my breakfast, eating my cantaloupe, you know,
before the talk, and they're like, are you our speaker?
I was like, yeah, are you going to talk about --
are you going to endorse rent control?
That was their first question for me.
I'm like, just relax.
So anyway, this is -- and then on the other side,
tenant rights folks get really, really angry with me
if I don't come out and say we absolutely need
really strict rent regulation.
So it's a super challenging one. Good question.
I was hoping you wouldn't ask that.
-On your last slide,
you talked about how the decline in homelessness among veterans.
Can you explain that a little bit?
-Yep.
So to be very clear, it's good politics to house veterans,
which is why we funded these programs
and why we haven't funded these programs
for a broader population of people.
And just to be very clear, I'm 100% in support of that.
Veterans are great.
My dad's a veteran, grandpa's a veteran.
And so because we had political wins in our favor,
we funded at the federal level resources
that went through HUD and the VA system to support people.
And we cut it by 50%.
And the interventions were different
for different people depending on where they were.
The benefit of that population
is you already have the VA system,
which is a point of contact for them for their healthcare.
And so it's easier to do this with veterans
than it would for a general population
who don't necessarily have a VA equivalent
where you can go and see your doctor
or get medical care or whatever.
And so replicating that might be a little more challenging,
but the biggest impediment to replicating
that is political will and resources.
If we decided to make the same decision,
could we have success with the general population?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a lot of discussion.
I was just in D.C.
at HUD two weeks ago talking with other researchers,
with senior staff at HUD,
and we were talking about Medicaid
and basically kind of using the Medicaid system as a mechanism
to kind of replicate the success with veterans,
because that's a point of healthcare contact
for people with low incomes.
You pair that with some housing supports through HUD
and, you know, we could have some success.
Not going to zero,
but we can make a lot of progress
without getting to zero, right?
Chicago levels in Seattle would be wonderful
if we could get there. -Yeah.
I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the way
that monopoly is impacting, sorry,
any thoughts about the way monopoly
is impacting homelessness?
Things like RealPage, collusion between rentals,
other things like that.
Hoarding of land and preventing buildings, stuff like that.
-Yep.
So the question was, you know,
is monopoly power among certain investor groups contributing
or causing this problem?
It is absolutely exacerbating the problem.
I think that the Department of Justice,
U.S. Department of Justice is suing right now,
basically under antitrust arguments to see
that there may have been collusive behavior
by owners of units to keep rents artificially high.
So that is an important issue. Is that the sole issue?
No, because we had affordability problems
before these actors got really,
really heavily involved in the housing market.
I think generally speaking,
what it is, is like
when you have a purely commodified housing system,
you're going to end up with some of these issues.
And so it is the responsibility to make sure
that people are acting in, you know,
not in anticompetitive ways. But ultimately,
we're still going to have people trying to maximize revenue even
if they're not doing so in a monopolistic way.
That's just the reality of the system we've created,
which is why I'm a big fan of subsidies.
Because if we're going to solely depend on profit maximizers,
and I'm a former profit maximizer for 17 years,
that's inconsistent with affordability.
And so when people say, Gregg, the problem here is capitalism.
Totally. I'm a pragmatist.
I doubt we're overthrowing the capitalist system anytime soon.
And so what I want to do is figure out
how can we help people in the interim.
It doesn't mean that I wouldn't kill
for a housing and cash assistance program
that looks like Denmark.
I think it would help a lot of people.
It would help a lot of people.
Is that likely, you know, in the next four years?
Probably not. Probably not. And so in the interim,
we then need to kind of put out fires, you know,
monopolistic fires and figure out what kind of supports
we can get and what can we do in Seattle.
And it's a patchwork.
We can make progress, we can do better than we are,
but fundamental change will require different decisions
at the federal level. I firmly believe that.
-Hi there, Gregg.
So I and I'm sure many people in this room
have lived in some questionable apartments over the years --
-Have lived in questionable what?
-Questionable apartments over the years,
maybe not the best quality.
Where is the balance between quality housing and
quantity of housing? -That's a great question.
So what's interesting is housing policy in the United States
going back a hundred years. At that point,
housing policy was designed solely to deal with quality.
We built housing because the quality of the housing stock
was so poor, literally like no plumbing and leaky
roofs and things like that.
And so when we moved from public housing to vouchers,
we made that move because generally speaking,
there was an acknowledgment
that our housing stock was actually of okay quality.
And what we now had was an income problem.
People couldn't afford it.
So we shifted our approach to housing.
The census data and housing quality would suggest
that we have very high quality housing in the United States.
But what is determined to be satisfactory
is it's a fairly low bar,
but generally speaking, people have plumbing,
they have roofs, you know, they have windows, et cetera.
And so we have "satisfactory" housing.
We know in many places
that's not the case, that there's plenty of housing
that's of low quality.
And frankly, the bigger issue is we have a crowding thing.
A lot of people are crowding into substandard housing,
which is unsafe and really not very good.
So what's the right balance?
I don't have a good answer for you,
other than we need a heck of a lot more units.
And the units that we'll be building
because of the standards we have in the United States
are going to be of a reasonably high caliber.
Does everyone need granite countertops?
No. No.
But any housing based on any building code in Seattle
right now will be of certainly high enough quality
for anyone in this room to live in.
And so, you know, what we say in the book,
which is kind of interesting is, we in the United States,
and I'm glad we did, we said, boy,
housing needs to be at this level.
And we just said, this is the level
at which housing needs to be built.
But then we never said,
what about people who can't afford housing at that level?
We just said, well, I'm out of that.
And so what we have not allowed is kind of an Indian style
where we have literally slums housing millions of people.
We don't have that.
We cleared our slums in the early 20th century,
but then we didn't create a mechanism
for people to afford this housing
that's now of higher quality. -Hey Gregg. Great.
Thanks again for writing the book.
Just you may have touched upon a response to this question,
but I'd love to hear just maybe expand
your thoughts a little bit. You mentioned, I think 90,
95% of the housing in the United States
is built through the private sector yet,
you know, we clearly have a public problem here.
I'd love to just hear your thoughts on,
you know, is there a big idea, a big bang, you know,
to release public funds? And I think in the book
you refer to some potential tax policy changes
that could help fund creation of housing at scale,
like you say,
in California rather than a billion-dollar funding,
a 50 billion or in the United States,
a 10 billion to 100 billion
or whatever the magnitude needs to be.
Can you speak to any of those kind of big bang approaches
that we can use to get more public financing
into solving this housing crisis?
Thank you.
-Great question. So I mentioned, I was in D.C.
two weeks ago.
I got invited with about 15 other people
to meet with the secretary of HUD
and senior staff to talk about basically the big idea.
And so the prompt that three of us had to write on this,
which was how do you end homelessness
in the United States?
And they gave us three pages.
Okay. Any other things you'd like us to do?
And so what I spent my time talking about
was under the current political regime,
it's not going to happen. Okay.
And HUD wanted from us, like,
how can we improve what we're doing right now?
That's a legitimate question,
but that's different than the fundamental change
that you're talking about.
And so ultimately, we have to have a different policy regime
if we're going to end this.
So setting aside the fine tuning of the existing system,
what could we do to change this?
A couple things.
At the federal level,
homeowners in the United States get a benefit
if they have a mortgage and they earn a certain income.
And that's the home mortgage interest tax deduction.
Prior to the 2017 tax reform,
that was about $50 or $60 billion of revenue
that the federal government didn't get.
It's now down to about 30,
but it's still a big number. At that time when it was 60,
was almost equivalent to the level of funding that we pay
to low-income households in the United States, right?
The people getting that benefit are people like me
who probably don't need it.
They're happy to get it,
and would be pissed off if someone said,
we're going to take it away from you,
but ultimately, they don't need it.
So we've allocated a ton of resources to middle
and upper income households who frankly don't need it.
So there've been a lot of people who've just said,
you get rid of that program,
you could double or triple the voucher program.
And that makes a huge difference.
Huge difference.
So that's one example, politically fraught.
In the state of Washington, we don't have a state income tax.
Okay.
Which is, when I say that to people around the country,
they're absolutely shocked.
They're like, I thought it was just Florida and Texas.
I was like, nope, us too. Okay.
And there are political reasons why we don't,
and we've made a run at this a couple of times,
from what I understand,
before I lived here, and it didn't go anywhere.
But a very modest income tax in the state of Washington
could fund billions and billions of dollars
to build this housing.
We actually do the math in the book
of what that would look like as a percentage increase
in the state budget in terms of revenue to generate,
let's say 10 or $12 billion
for housing in the Puget Sound region.
We wouldn't notice it.
We funded $50 billion for light transit, 30 years overdue.
And that was a fight.
But ultimately, no one's life changed.
It's not like we're walking around like,
oh my gosh, I can't afford coffee
because I'm paying for light rail.
No one's saying that, like,
you pay more when you park at the Seahawks game or something.
I don't even know what all the mechanisms are,
but we generated $50 billion.
So the money exists to do this,
but we just don't think about housing as infrastructure.
And so the other thing that I raised when we were with HUD is,
all of this doesn't need to be a grant.
The federal government can make a huge impact
by just giving us low interest loans.
So I'm on the board of Bellwether,
which is a big, well,
the biggest affordable housing developer,
nonprofit developer in Seattle.
We got money from Amazon.
Amazon has a housing equity fund, which has been great.
We got 1% money from Amazon. It's a loan.
And it made a huge difference.
We were allowed to build projects and pursue projects
that we would not have been able to do without that money.
Now, we can have a philosophical debate about
whether we should have tech companies funding
social welfare,
which is, I think an interesting conversation.
The federal government literally has a printing press, right?
And they have the lowest borrowing costs in the world.
They could be pushing money out to communities to say,
you need to build housing.
If you're willing to build housing,
we'll give you 1% money, and they can track that.
And eventually that money comes back.
And is there a net loss to the government?
Yes, but it's not a grant, right?
So there are ideas,
but these are huge departures from where we are right now.
So it is like, it feels like a monumental leap,
but it doesn't need to be.
Yep. -All right.
I have two last questions for you.
-Hi.
I know earlier you mentioned
that you get accused of being a corporate shill.
And on that note,
I was wondering how do you navigate conversations
with people who oppose the construction of more housing
using social justice values,
either as a way to discourage any -- oh, okay.
-It's not your fault. I can't quite hear you.
So you said how do I deal with conversations?
-Yeah, conversations with people
who use social justice values to oppose the construction
of new housing,
either from a nimby standpoint of not wanting
their neighborhood to change,
or from people who have genuine concerns
about gentrification with like the construction
of new market rates, housing.
-So the question was dealing with,
there are a lot of people with very good intentions
who sometimes oppose housing development.
And those grounds might be on,
you know, my neighborhood has been gentrified.
I am Black.
I used to live in the central district.
The entire Black population, not entire,
but a big chunk of the Black population in Seattle
has been pushed south through gentrification
over the last 20 years.
Our neighborhoods have been the destination
for a lot of public investment and supports,
and we're tired of it.
And as soon as you start building housing,
what happens then the Starbucks and the Chipotle shows up,
and now it's not affordable anymore.
So we don't want to do that.
And so I understand those concerns.
My answer to that is,
is these processes happen independent of
whether we build the housing or not.
And so if we're worried about price increases
in certain locations by not building housing,
we will exacerbate those price increases.
There's not an option where we just say we're out
unless our employers in Seattle stop hiring.
And so I firmly believe that we need to build more housing.
What we've not done in the past
is build housing with a plan about
how to serve incumbent residents.
So to me the answer to that question is not should we build
or not build,
but how do we build in a responsible way
such that we don't displace all the people
who previously lived there.
That we can do better.
That's where we failed in the past.
We can do that better.
And we know that there are systems.
It's not easy, but we absolutely have to do that.
What was the other example? It was --
-It was one with people
who have like genuine concerns about gentrification,
and the other is like rich single-family homeowners --
-Yeah.
And then the other one is the people who look like me,
who just like, I don't want my neighborhood to change.
That has a huge political problem.
I have less patience for that argument
because it's really not supported by anything other
than kind of exclusionary impulses.
And so that's one
where we just have to kind of call out what's happening,
which is you've hit the demographic lottery
and now you're trying to preserve the proceeds
of this lottery
and so let's have a broader conversation
and think about the implications of the decisions
that you're making.
-So we -- I have two questions,
so I'll ask the first one first.
We mentioned Europe and Asia earlier in the conversation,
were there any international responses
that would have worked in the U.S.
to address housing issues?
-So a couple examples.
So when people say,
you know, homelessness is impossible to fix,
I can't remember,
did I talk about Scandinavia example earlier?
Okay, I did that at lunch today.
So rates of homelessness in Scandinavia
are far lower than the United States.
Why? They have income and housing supports.
Do they have a homelessness problem?
Yes, but the acuity of the people experiencing homelessness
is super high in Scandinavia
because basically they have the system.
The only people who slip through those cracks
are people with really intense needs.
So generally speaking, homelessness in Scandinavia
is focused on mental health and addiction,
which is fine because the other stuff's taken care of.
Now the problem is here is we're focusing on those things,
plus we're trying to figure out how to get people
who are serving coffee at Starbucks housed, right?
And so in essence like we have all these plates spinning
and the homeless response system is trying to keep them all
in the air, which is really, really difficult.
One of the examples internationally
that is really interesting is Tokyo.
Tokyo has built so much housing and it has some
of the cheapest housing in the world for a huge city.
Why? Because their supply is unbelievable.
And there's all sorts of nuances around that and details.
And I'm not an expert on Japanese housing policy,
but that is a prime example.
If you're a supply kind of person,
it shows the effect of huge supply effects
in terms of maintaining affordability
in a growing dynamic city.
That's pretty remarkable.
It's actually people will go over there and say,
I can't believe how cheap housing is.
It's a total global outlier.
They build a ton of housing.
And then there's all sorts of different models.
Quick stats, so generally speaking,
in a lot of northern European countries,
between 15 and 30% of their housing stock is publicly owned.
Okay. Do you know what that number is in the United States?
Yep. It's less than 1%. Okay.
And so we're shocked that people are having trouble.
Well, yeah,
because in essence
we just have a totally marketized housing system.
And so are we going to get from 0.7% to 25%?
Probably not. Probably not.
But the idea,
the other benefit of that social housing is it's not stigmatized.
Like Cabrini-Green in the United States was stigmatized
because it's public housing and then da, da, da, right?
You're a school teacher in Amsterdam.
It's like, yeah, I live in social housing.
We just call it housing, right?
A third of people live there.
So anyway, we're not going to be Denmark tomorrow,
but the point is, is that there are other systems in the world
that have different impacts and outcomes.
We've made a decision, and that decision has consequences.
And that's why we're here on a Tuesday night
talking about this.
-And the second question, I used to be your student.
So I've thought about this question for a long time.
What motivated you to write the book as someone
who hadn't been homeless before?
-Well, what motivated me to write the book
was just an observation that this is so unnecessary.
It's totally unnecessary.
We have more than enough resources
in this country to end this.
There are social problems that are going to be,
that we're going to be fighting,
dealing with long beyond my time on this earth.
Unfortunately, we're still going to be dealing with poverty,
we're going to be dealing with climate change,
we're going to be dealing with racism.
I would love for those issues to go away.
They're probably not going away.
This is one that we could
absolutely get rid of in my lifetime.
There's no doubt about it.
So.
And I think --
and so the motivation for writing the book was,
my sense was that we had
a collective misunderstanding of the problem.
And that misunderstanding was a huge impediment to progress.
That's why I wanted to write the book.
Thanks all. Appreciate it.
[Applause]