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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. We have our guest today from the University of Washington, Professor Gregg Colburn. He's more than just a professor when you hear about his background in just a minute. We are going to be talking about homelessness, and we're going to be covering a lot in his book, "Homelessness is a Housing Problem." I recommend that you buy this book, read this book, listen to this book, however you like to get your books, especially if you're a data nerd like me, you're really going to like it and the thoroughness of it. But if you think about homelessness in contrast to the American dream of single family ownership with a yard, a sidewalk, a garage, and maybe even a garden, today in America, 62% of housing units are owner occupied, the remaining 38% are in rental status. Most of those are with private landlords, with just 7% subsidized through tax payer funded programs. So welcome, Gregg Colburn to the show of The Common Bridge. It's an honor to have you here.
Gregg Colburn
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Richard Helppie
What you're going to hear today on The Common Bridge is popular misconceptions destroyed and you're going to hear about a well researched policy solution. So we're welcoming Professor Colburn to The Common Bridge. Gregg, you've got such a great background. We can't go into all of it beyond the honors and awards, maybe a quick thumbnail on your biography. Where did you grow up? What was your undergraduate, graduate, your investor career and then how'd you end up at the University of Washington teaching and researching?
Gregg Colburn
Sure, I'm a Midwesterner, I was raised in Minnesota, just outside the Twin Cities, and went to undergrad in Michigan at Albion College, began a career at that point in the finance space. I was an investment banker in New York with Goldman Sachs and moved to Chicago with Goldman and then worked in the private equity and buy-side arena for another 13, 14 years. I was about to turn 40 and had a long term interest in being a professor and so it was getting to the point where it's like, well, if I'm going to make a change, I probably should do so sooner rather than later. Ultimately I ended up getting my PhD in public policy with a focus on housing policy. At the conclusion of that degree program in 2017 was fortunate enough to land a position with the University of Washington here in Seattle, and have been thrilled to have this as my professional and academic home. Obviously, if you're interested in housing and homelessness - it's either good or bad, depending on your perspective - but there's no shortage of things to study in Seattle given the housing challenges we have out here.
Richard Helppie
Your master's degree is from Northwestern University?
Gregg Colburn
Yes, I got my MBA at Northwestern while I was in my first career, that's right.
Richard Helppie
Well, looks like you're not going to get far from the Big 10, or actually, the Big 10 is not going to get far from you.
Gregg Colburn
Can't get away from the Big 10, it just keeps following me.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. So just in setting the stage, how big a problem is homelessness?
Gregg Colburn
Well, there are a couple of different ways to measure homelessness; one of the challenges is homelessness is a little hard to to measure because it's a population that is difficult to count. The stated figure of homelessness in the United States is about 582,000 people on a single night and that's based on a census that we do every January; every jurisdiction does that. Most people agree that that's likely an under-count because so many people experiencing unsheltered homelessness are difficult to find. So we recognize that it's kind of a floor estimate; in fact, it's probably higher. But that estimate also doesn't take into account that for a lot of people, homelessness tends to be a relatively episodic occurrence, meaning you're kind of in and then out. Many scholars have said, well, what's the prevalence of homelessness over a year, for example, how many people experience homelessness within a year, not just on a given night. Once we start talking about those longer time periods, now we're talking about millions of people, not just hundreds of thousands. The other thing that's really important is the United States has a definition of homelessness that excludes a lot of people who are precariously housed. So for example, if I run into difficulty and Rich, you're kind enough to let me sleep on your couch for a month, per the federal definition I am not homeless even though I'm without a residence and I'm only housed because of your generosity. Other nations around the world actually include doubled up - which is the term for that type of living arrangement - in their count of homelessness. There have been some estimates, based on census data, that there are multiples; for every person who's experiencing homelessness, there are multiple people experiencing doubled up homelessness, which is not captured in the federal definition. So it is a significant phenomenon in the United States. It is nowhere near the poverty crisis where 12-15% of the population is below the federal poverty line but we're talking about millions of people who are precariously housed. It's definitely - either for humanitarian reasons, social reasons, economic reasons - worthy of our time and attention as a nation, in my opinion anyway.
Richard Helppie
Well, I come from a background in healthcare information and we know there's a correlation between housing instability and consumption of health care services, for sure. People that are moving a lot tend not to have great health status, and also on education, children trying to attend school that don't have housing security or stability aren't going to do as well. I know that there are numbers of schools of thought about in how you approached your study; is it individual or is it systemic? One of the things you call out in your book is that we've always had mental illness, we've always had poverty, substance abuse, but we didn't have the homelessness. So what's changed, or why today are we experiencing this level of homelessness in a country as rich as the United States of America?
Gregg Colburn
That's a great question. I'm going to just do a quick history lesson here. I promise not to belabor this, but there have really been two major manifestations of homelessness over the last 150 years in the United States. The first one was during the Great Depression in the 1930s, began in 1929. And that episode of homelessness was, to a certain extent, somewhat intuitive. We had a massive economic shock, 25% unemployment, banks are failing, people's homes are being foreclosed on, and so what happened is we ended up with these tent villages and cities called Hoovervilles, named after Herbert Hoover, who was president when the Depression started. And while tragic, everyone said, well, yes, if we have this huge economic depression, it seems to make intuitive sense that we have homelessness. We get out of the depression, we go to World War II, we end up with economic prosperity of the 50s and 60s, 70s are a little shaky, and we ended up - at the end of the 70s as we're transitioning from Carter to Reagan - it's a tough time, gas prices are high, inflation is high, interest rates are high, we have a recession; it's not a depression, but it's recession. We start to see a little bit more homelessness. What's fascinating is when you read accounts from that time - this now moves into the early 80s - people are saying, well, when the economy bounces back, homelessness will go away. In fact programming at that point, on homelessness, was under FEMA, which is really a disaster relief approach, meaning this is a temporary condition like a flood, like a hurricane, therefore we're going to provide federal resources on a temporary basis. Well, if you remember the economics of the 80s, we end up with an economic boom during Reagan's end of his first term and into the second term the economy takes off, stock market takes off, employment takes off and what happens? Homelessness is still sticking there which caused a whole bunch of people to scratch their heads and say, well, what is going on here? So this really starts the modern manifestation of homelessness, which, unlike prior episodes where it was just single men on trains, hobos, skid row, all of a sudden we're seeing families and children, and women and children, and older adults and a broader population of people experiencing homelessness. That caused a lot of people to say, hmm, what has fundamentally changed? What has changed over the last 40 years is the relationship between income and housing costs, [which have] deviated; meaning housing costs have continued to go up while inflation adjusted incomes for middle and lower income households have stagnated. That has put a lot of pressure on households. Frankly, federal support for low income households on housing has stagnated or declined over that time period. So when you combine these forces with an inadequate policy response, we end up with a really difficult conundrum, which is huge wealth, great economic advances over the last 40 years, while persistently high levels of homelessness. That's really what prompted me to want to write this book.
Richard Helppie
I like the way you've gone after the research and I want to dig into that and probably dispense some of the headline reasons or the knee jerk reasons that people see. But I recall that period, late 1970s, early 1980s, and what was going on. This was when the automotive industry, which was the underpinning of our economy, was really starting to feel the first post World War II effects of international competition. There was a great dislocation of people leaving my hometown of Detroit, Michigan, going to Houston, Dallas, other sunbelt places looking for work. There was actually a derogatory term called “black taggers” because the license plate of Michigan at that time was a black license plate. It kind of masked things but it also was the beginning of the end of the era of a blue collar job making a home and vacations and a boat affordable. We're downstream from there and this is why I was fascinated with [the fact that] you're not looking at the short, easy answers. Some of the things you dispel in your book with your research is, how important is weather, really. I remember when I first came across you, you were quoted in the LA Times and you were comparing the homelessness in Detroit and Los Angeles. My instinct was, yeah, it's easier to live outside in Los Angeles in February, don't do that in Michigan, you won't last very long. As a Minnesotan I know you'll understand that more. So what did you discover? How important really is - I guess it's all one answer - weather and local policy and water and mountains as it pertains to trying to get more supply on the market? When you think about this what kind of conclusions did you reach?
Gregg Colburn
Well, we tackled a whole bunch of potential explanations. The motivating question in the book is what explains regional variation of rates of homelessness? That's the question we ask. Just to give a brief answer to that, or to at least quantify that variation, because I think that's important for the answer on the weather front, which is we have coastal cities, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Washington DC, that have five times the per capita homelessness of Chicago, for example. And Indianapolis and St. Louis and Baltimore and Cleveland are in the same boat of Midwestern cities. So we have massive variation from the coasts to some Midwestern cities. Why is that? And so we test a bunch of explanations to try to provide a credible answer to that question. One of them that I hear whenever I'm at a cocktail party and someone hears that I study homelessness is, well, the weather is moderate on the west coast so of course, we have lots of homelessness. And Gregg, in Chicago it is cold in January so of course. And I'll say, well, that's fine but you're ignoring the fact that Boston and New York are very cold in January and they have very, very high rates of homelessness, and you're ignoring the fact that Miami and Dallas and San Antonio and Phoenix and other southern cities – Charlotte - that are mild in January, don't have big problems with homelessness. So certainly the LA-Detroit comparison is convenient if you want to make a weather argument. But if you actually take a broader look at the nation, that argument doesn't hold up. Now, weather does play a role and we talk about this in the book. The policy response, in the sense that total homelessness includes people in shelter and people who are on the streets, East Coast cities that are cold have constructed robust shelter systems and therefore house a large percentage of the people experiencing homelessness in shelters. West Coast cities, it's about a 50/50 mix. So conspicuous, unsheltered homelessness that we see on the street is more prevalent on the West Coast. There might be a weather story there but LA doesn't have more homelessness because of weather. It's just we don't build shelter on the West Coast, because you won't die in January like you would in Boston. Weather is not to blame. The other argument is this mobility argument that we've created an environment which fosters or encourages people to move here and experience homelessness because of tremendous generosity. We find no evidence of that. There's extensive literature demonstrating that this is not a mobility argument. People come back and push back on me and I'll say, is there an anecdote to the contrary? Sure, but we shouldn't make policy based on anecdote. Generally speaking, homelessness is a homegrown problem, that people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles are from those communities. There is some mobility from suburbs to the urban core related to homelessness, but we don't see a lot of Topeka-Seattle type mobility around homelessness because, generally speaking, these benefits that people always rail against are not very generous; you're not going to relocate for modest benefits. We also know that state to state mobility falls with income; moving is hard and it's really hard if you have no resources. If your social networks are in Seattle are you going to leave Seattle? No, you aren't. For all those reasons these convenient explanations for regional variation don't hold up.
Richard Helppie
Anybody ever looked at the type of housing stock, in that Detroit - which I'm very familiar with - had a high percentage of the housing stock as single family homes and Los Angeles is more multifamily? Is there any correlation between the type of housing stock available and the degree of homelessness?
Gregg Colburn
Not really. Seattle is actually structured very similar to Midwestern cities where 75% is zoned single family in Seattle, which is one of our huge political battles right now, because we need to densify if we're going to accommodate all the people who want to live here. Certainly New York is going to have less single family, although there are places in outer boroughs that are heavily single family. So no, I don't think the actual stock of housing is the bigger issue. What we see is the vacancy rate, the rental market vacancy rate, is far more important in a city or county, and that's what drives it much more than just the built environment.
Richard Helppie
One of the things that you phrased that was new term to me, is called a policy of "banishment." People want to live here but they don't have the means to, so we're going to, in effect, criminalize it and move them out. But your research discovered that's not a solution that has any kind of stickiness to it.
Gregg Colburn
It's a spatial fix. So there's a great book written by two University of Washington professors called "Banished" if your listeners are interested in that. The criminalization concept, I first got interested in this when I was living in New York in Manhattan, in the mid 90s. Giuliani was mayor and Giuliani was on a push to clean up Manhattan. What a clean up of Manhattan meant, it meant getting homeless people off the subways and off the streets. I remember riding the subway from the Upper West Side, where I lived, down to Wall Street, to my office, and there'd be people sleeping on the subway, who were likely experiencing homelessness, and the police would come on the subway, rip this person up out of a dead sleep and drag them off. It was kind of hard to watch if you're a softy and like, this is a tough situation. I remember thinking, I wonder where these people are going. It didn't end homelessness, what it did was it moved homelessness out of Manhattan such that people who lived there, people who were vacationing in Manhattan, didn't confront it. So we have a long history of Chamber of Commerce motivations to end homelessness in the urban core and I understand those motivations. But we're fooling ourselves if that is ending homelessness. For example, we had the All Star game here in Seattle this summer. As we were walking around downtown...I will say in the last five years, it hasn't looked that nice in the week leading up to the All Star game, all because the whole world was coming to Seattle. The mayor got some flack for that because it was very clear - and they wouldn't admit it - but it was very clear that they were clearing people out so that people who came to Seattle to enjoy the All Star game were not confronted with homelessness. It's not just New York, it's not just Giuliani, there are all sorts of cities that are doing this even even today.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, it's part of the preparation for the Superbowl. It's set up shelters with food, beverages and big televisions, with the proviso people stay off the streets. Do you know if anybody's gone into the tent cities and said who's there, why are they there? In recent times I've been to Salem, Oregon and underneath the highway overpasses are cheek to jowl tent cities and you see it across the overpasses in Los Angeles. I don't want to decide who's there and why are they there. Has anybody gone in there and talked to folks, like what's bringing you here?
Gregg Colburn
Oh, sure. There's been a lot of of research that goes into encampments or shelters to understand who is experiencing homelessness and what brought them there. For people who are interested, there are plenty of books and journal articles on that topic. I have never experienced homelessness. I've never experienced housing precarity but I've talked to a lot of people who have or have in the past. I'll say every story is unique. If you think you're going to go in there and get one consistent story that's just not the case.
Richard Helppie
I'd expect to hear poverty, and I'd expect to see mental illness, drug use, I expect to see some choice as well, that folks, this is my best option. As you know, when Silicon Valley was booming, we had people that couldn't afford to live there and they were sleeping on the buses and that type of thing. (Gregg Colburn: Totally.) So I like things kind of at the retail level; what's going to help that person move into a better housing situation?
Gregg Colburn
As part of the point in time count every January, we actually conduct surveys and ask people about their experiences. It's one of the things we write about in the book, which is you get all sorts of answers from people; my boyfriend beat me up and I ran, I got in a fight with my roommate so she kicked me out now I'm homeless, I drink too much, I lost my job - my car broke down and I couldn't get to work and now I'm unemployed. All of these, what we call precipitating events, cause people to experience homelessness. What we try to draw a distinction between in the book is to honor these precipitating events, because they absolutely are these people's truth, but also understanding that if my wife and I were to get divorced tonight, neither of us are going to be homeless tomorrow. So divorce in and of itself is not a cause of homelessness but in the wrong set of circumstances that absolutely can be a factor that drives someone into homelessness. When we ask someone, why are you now living in a tent? Like, well, I got divorced and I'm not in my house anymore. There's this broader context of precarity that we don't really think about and that people don't respond to when [asked]. What's interesting is the Seattle Times will publish the results of these surveys and then people will say, see, no one mentioned high housing costs.
Richard Helppie
Think about the divorce person that says, alright, I've got to find a place to live, I don't have a roof over my head, my wife tells me I'm not welcome back in my own home, or my former home, and I'm still working, I still have a job, but I can't afford the rent. You talk about the housing cost burden; we've had decades of money printing so the inflation has been hitting us for a long time, we have much higher rates of taxation on work. We talked about the 1980s, what the rate of Social Security payments were then versus today; that wage is getting pressed, wages are down because we don't have those big manufacturing payrolls rolling through the economy and we have inflation. It all adds up to me, that especially a person coming out of a divorce doesn't have enough cash flow to meet the rent and therefore their option is I've got to stay outside or I've got to go find another answer. Am I on the right track at all with that?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I mean, what we find in the book is that high concentrations of homelessness happen in places with really high rents and low vacancies. So when life happens - for some of us this is an inconvenience for others, it has really, really significant consequences - if life happens in Seattle, something unfortunate happens, the outcomes are very different than in Detroit. Which is why Detroit - with the highest poverty rate in the nation - has far lower rates of homelessness than a really affluent city like Seattle - when you're one paycheck away from trouble, it's easier to figure it out when rents are 700 bucks than when rents are $3,000.
Richard Helppie
The way you've categorized them, I found it interesting that Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago and Cleveland, they're flat to negative growth, along with low per capita homelessness. Los Angeles and New York - opposite coasts, large populations, modest growth - high homelessness. Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, the coastal boom towns, high population growth, low supply, high prices, high homelessness. And in contrast to that, Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas - high growth, high supply because of a lot of building - low homelessness. As I was working my way through your book, anticipating what you were going to say in the last chapter, I'm thinking, is he going say, we need to build more housing units? I was going to ask are we going to build different kinds because you gave a foreshadowing of density and things that might go into single family neighborhoods, some kind of acceptable multifamily situation. What part of producing more housing and/or creating more density goes into the solution and how might we get there as a country?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I think, first of all, one of the challenges with housing and real estate is it's intensely local so setting national housing policy is difficult because you're setting housing policy for Detroit and Seattle at the same time, which are two...same country, but other than that, no similarities in terms of market dynamics, employment, poverty, built environment, population growth, etc, etc. So that's hard. When we think about what the solutions are, is building more housing alone in Seattle going to end homelessness? No, we've got to figure out how people can afford this housing; just building market rate housing won't fix it. But I will say not building housing and allowing vacancy rates to stay at 3% and rents just keep going up and up and up, will continue to exacerbate this crisis. One of the solutions for coastal cities is one, we have to densify; we can't sprawl because these places have mountains and water which inhibit our ability to sprawl like Charlotte or Austin is doing. We're going to need to densify. It's going to be more multifamily housing. We need a lot of housing units. The estimates are we need 500,000 housing units. Actually, the latest is 800,000 housing units in Puget Sound over the next 25 years. That's a massive amount of housing. We're not going to build 800,000 units of public housing or subsidized housing - that's not going to happen. We need private developers to build, build, build, build, build, build, and at the same time we need to be thinking about, for people who have lower incomes, how are they going to access some of this housing. That's a different policy discussion. So when people say, well, I'm not convinced that's going to work. It's like, well, it may not but we do know that when you have adequate housing - and part of the adequate housing in Detroit is the fact that you built a bunch of housing in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, you lost 30% of your population and housing doesn't disappear when people leave - so what happens is you end up with higher vacancies and lower rents. Despite all the challenges that Detroit has had, they've been able to maintain a relatively low rate of homelessness so we do know that adequate housing can help. The question is, for the cities that have gotten way behind the eight ball - my city being one of them - how do you get out of that? It's really, really, really hard. It's going to take a lot, it's going to take help from the feds, from the state, from cities, from counties, as well as private action, in terms of building housing. I'm not optimistic that we're going to make big changes in the next couple of years but I do know that not building housing will exacerbate a problem that's already pretty bad.
Richard Helppie
In Detroit, it's far worse; we lost 60% inside the city limits, 60% of the population from peak to trough. We lost housing supply because people walked away and they've just knocked them down. Now the good news is they're making good use...we have a great mayor right now in Mike Duggan, who is making good use of the infrastructure: the roads and the sewers and the like and all the access to water and things we have here. So one of the things I was pondering [is] gentrification, where you have an old impoverished neighborhood...and maybe younger people are more entrepreneurial. People say I can't afford to live in the expensive suburbs but I can buy that home there and rehab it. They're going to put up with all the urban ills until the neighborhood starts to turn around. Do you have a view whether gentrification is good or not good? I know this may differ based on markets and the like, but any thoughts about gentrification?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I think that gentrification and displacement, which are related concepts, are super important parts when we start to think about the development that's needed in our cities. I think the problem with gentrification and associated displacement is it ignores, many times, incumbent residents. What has happened in Seattle, for example, the central district for Seattle was the home of the black population in Seattle for generations. As Seattle boomed, Amazon came to town, people realized, hey, this is pretty convenient, we're right near downtown, we're near Amazon's campus, I'm going to start living here. So what has happened over the last 20 years is the black population in Seattle has been hollowed out and in essence has been displaced to South King County. These important civic institutions, churches, etc, that serve that population now are in the middle of these highly gentrified neighborhoods. So if you're a landowner and property prices have gone up, you might say gentrification is great. If you are a black resident of Seattle, whose grandparents and parents lived in the central district and now you're living in South King County, you might say, no, this is terrible, I lost my home, I lost my social network, the culture that I was raised in. What I think is important when we start to think about changing the built environment, is doing so in a way that is thoughtful, that allows for incumbent residents to continue to live there while also building the new housing that's desperately needed. So we've talked about - and I've been involved in some legislative efforts out here - is, for example, around transit, when we're going to build a whole bunch...ideally, you would build a lot of housing, dense housing, near transit areas, to ensure that there is a gentrification displacement strategy. Because if you just start building, what's going to happen is people are going to get pushed out and I think there's an equity issue there. There are negative consequences that, generally speaking, we've ignored until it's too late and we say, oh, look at what just happened. So is it possible to build all the units we need without some gentrification? No, I think it's highly, highly unlikely. But can we do so in a more intelligent way such that we don't completely hollow out communities in the process? I would hope that the answer to that question is yes, with some proper planning.
Richard Helppie
When you talk about densification and multifamily, whether it's a small apartment building inside of a formerly single family rental, or some of the things that some of the university towns have experienced, they had huge single family homes that were no longer practical. They got divided into flats, then they got removed for condo development, but then as the more higher income people came in, there's an acute lack of affordable housing. The policy response is we'll make...it's subsidized to a degree but it is not market rents. Is that part of the solution?
Gregg Colburn
Just so I understand your question; is the densification of urban neighborhoods part of the solution? Is that...am I getting that correct?
Richard Helppie
Exactly and how we get there and if we're going to go from big houses that become flats and now if they're to get more dense, we're going to put in condos or rental properties, and should some be set aside for affordability, for your police officer, school teachers and the like.
Gregg Colburn
So I think Minneapolis, my hometown, the nation is watching Minneapolis right now because they took the bold step of of eliminating single family zoning throughout the entire city so it is now illegal. Well, it used to be illegal to build multifamily housing on many of the parcels because it was zoned for single family. So this change in Minneapolis is important for a couple of reasons. One is it doesn't outlaw single family homes. If you live in a single family home, no one's going to take it away from you. The point is, is that if you decide to leave or redevelop your property, you can put up a three flat or four flat. That's what the the law now allows and that is a key tool. We're not building Midtown Manhattan in Minneapolis but we are allowing for far more density as the city grows and evolves over the next couple of decades. I think that is a move that we're going to see. The state of Oregon has done that, California has made some of these changes we've done in Washington around transit; what we're going to see is a lot more action of this type. Will that face some resistance? Sure it will, because people like single family neighborhoods, but this change will happen slowly over time. While we do that there's an important debate around how do we then ensure affordability? Part of it is adequate supply which will help with affordability because we won't have these really low vacancy rates driving rents up; just more supply alone will help. But then there do need to be some policy responses around how can we do this to create affordability, and that's going to come down to some form of subsidy; construction subsidy or potentially some some subsidy to homeowners or to renters in the form of vouchers or whatever. I think the middle is really interesting, which is third grade teachers can't afford to live in Seattle anymore. That's a problem. I think people of all political persuasions agree that you can't have a community without police officers, without firefighters, without teachers who serve their community living there. And so there's a big push around missing middle housing in many cities for this very reason; that hopefully we can construct it without massive subsidy but we just need to acknowledge the fact that people making $70,000 a year need to be able to live in the cities that they serve. And hopefully through higher density housing, different building types, we can begin to create that housing that's desperately needed.
Richard Helppie
I lived in Houston for a couple of years in the 1970s. And Houston, of course, famously, has no zoning. But what developers did to get around that, they had deed restrictions. There's no zoning, but in the deed it limited what you could do with that piece of dirt. So when we look at the policy response, I think that this is a knotty problem, as you call out in your book, if it wasn't a knotty, complicated problem, it'd be solved by right now. So when you try to find that optimal place between what you describe in your writing as tensions; the tensions between short term versus longer term thinking, between a public response and a private sector response, and federal versus local, I thought you've done a really great job. I'm sure you're getting push-back from every entrenched interest every place and probably like this program, you're getting criticized from the Right and the Left. (Greg Colburn: Yep.) Okay. You're just trying to solve a problem and if you keep focused on that, versus thinking you are going to try to make people happy, you're going to be fine. Your qualifications in the private sector, I think, will be well worn. But with all of that as a preamble, can you take us through what you're looking at as a policy response? If you were the czar of housing in the United States of America, what would you recommend? Or if the president called you today and said, Professor Colburn, come and tell me what we need to do, what advice would you give him?
Gregg Colburn
Sure. Well, it's...you're exactly right. It's funny, I've given this talk, I just gave my 80th book talk. I gave one in New York and one in Minnesota last week. What I joke is I've been accused of being a shill for corporate interests and being a socialist in the same talk.
Richard Helppie
We're fellow travelers, I get that on the same episode sometimes. [Laughter.]
Gregg Colburn
So that's kind of entertaining. I'm accused of being a socialist because I believe there's a public role in dealing with this crisis, and I'm accused of being a corporate shill because I'm saying that the private market needs to build a whole bunch of our housing. We need to make it easier for them to do so, I believe that both of those are true. And I don't think that either of those positions makes me either a socialist or shill for corporate interests but that's a topic for a different discussion. In terms of policy response, I'm going to just touch on the tensions for a moment and then get back to the bigger picture of what do we do. The challenge, if you're the mayor of Seattle right now, is Rome is burning and the voters are saying I am sick and tired of having this person urinate outside of my restaurant, get these people out of here. The problem for the mayor is this is an issue that is 30-40 years in the making and I now have to figure this out in four years. It's impossible. It is impossible. So one of the tensions is, well, maybe I do the Giuliani thing, which is just sweep people, get them out of the city and make people feel better. It's not changing homelessness, it's just relocating it. The other problem is standing up and saying, we know that building housing will fix this, building affordable housing will end this but that's going to take ten years. Well, you need to figure it out in the next three years, because that's when the next election is. We have this huge tension. Then we say, well, should the public be building housing or private? The answer is both. And then this really challenging issue of, is this a DC problem or is this a state of Washington or a Seattle problem? And the answer is, it's all the above. If I were...and I recently met with Governor Jay Inslee, here in Washington, and we had this very discussion of what should we do, I think the answer to the question is different depending on the level of government. If I were meeting with the White House at the federal level, what I would say is we need to understand that the federal government has, in essence, not provided sufficient support for poor people over the last 40 years. One in four people who are eligible for housing support get it from the feds, the other three out of four are going to the state of Michigan or the state of Washington or their city saying, I need help, housing is really expensive and I can't afford it. We have a system, in the United States, for better or worse, that produces 13-14% poverty and we help about four or five percent of households with housing. The others are are just stuck. The outcomes we see right now, it's math, it's math. And if we don't change that, it's not going to deviate. In my suggestions, I need to state that I'm a pragmatist. So is this the ideal strategy if I had a clean slate? No, but I'm also a pragmatist. I think the most pragmatic possible solution at the federal level is to expand the voucher program. Right now, one in four people get it; if all four of those people got it, it would provide a lot more purchasing power for low income households to have... (Richard Helppie: Section 8 rental vouchers?) It's now called the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the former Section 8 program. That would be a policy recommendation. Why that's helpful is once you give the purchasing power - and DC has way more money than any state or local government and even an expansion of the voucher program, while significant, is still frankly not that huge with respect to the overall federal budget - what that helps with is, if you're in the state of Michigan or state of Washington, then the states and localities can say we now have people with purchasing power, how do we make sure we have adequate housing in which they can use that. What I would say to governors and to mayors is we need to make sure that we have a regulatory framework that allows for the construction of housing and adequate housing. If people continue to move the state of Washington, that we have housing that people can use, and then for people who are low income, they have purchasing power through these vouchers. The problem if you're the governor or the mayor, is if DC is not acting - and they haven't acted over the last 30 years and we aren't going to right now, even on this more modest proposal of voucher expansion - what do you do? Now people don't have purchasing power and we don't have housing. That's why this is so hard. So do states need to invest in this? Absolutely. Absolutely. Whatever you can do to make housing more affordable or get money in people's pockets such that they can afford housing, to me, is a positive step. Is that hard? Absolutely it is. I'm not pretending that it isn't. I will say the one thing that's really interesting is that we in the United States think of housing as a private good. Transit, for example, is a public good. When we think about the investments we've made in transit...in our region we just made a $55 billion investment in public transit. And was it a fight? Sure was a fight, but ultimately, we desperately needed it. From Everett, where Boeing planes are made, all the way down to Olympia and Tacoma, we're going to have light rail. You could live up there, work at Amazon, take the light rail down to Seattle, and it will hopefully spread out some of this demand throughout the region. $55 billion. The recent proposal from the governor in Washington was for $4 billion for housing. What's interesting about that is that was kind of a shoot the moon number that didn't go anywhere, but in comparison to our investments in transit, it pales in comparison, not even 1/10. It's not even 1/10. This private notion of housing really constrains our imagination in terms of overall investments. I think that's a challenge, especially in places that have the deficit of housing, especially affordable housing, like we have in our state. I wish I had a better policy response that was easier but the point is, is that this is complicated. I think the last thing I want to say is, at the federal level, we have made food an important part of our safety net. If you are poor and eligible for food stamps, which is now called SNAP, you get it - four out of four. Housing, it's one in four. We have drawn a distinction between food and housing in terms of supports to low income households and we're living with the consequences of that decision now.
Richard Helppie
I understand then that you're talking about the supply side. I have a regulatory framework where more housing units can be built, and perhaps incentives to build them. Let's create multifamily so now we have more units available, instead of this plot of land being for one family it could be for four; you're raising supply. And of course, if you raise supply, classic economics says that prices should fall, and also on the demand side, making sure that the parts of our population that need that support has it through housing vouchers. Now, if my understanding is correct the housing vouchers would only be for rental. What if someone that is in that situation, they qualified today for a housing voucher, do they give up an aspiration of home ownership and all that equity and wealth building and such that goes along with that? Is there an exit way out of that subsidy or is it just a condition for a certain part of the population?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I think that's an income question. Is there an exit ramp? For sure, there are plenty of people who, in essence, kind of age out of rental subsidies because their income becomes too high. Then they move on and rent in the private market on their own or could become homeowners. I don't think in any way that prevents someone from accessing home ownership. I think the question is - and this is true for unsubsidized households as well - can you save enough money for a down payment and can you get a mortgage? All those questions then become the gating factors in terms of being able to access home ownership. So no, it's not a permanent state - for some people it would be a permanent state probably, because they just may not have whatever is needed to earn income high enough to access housing in the private market, especially in a place that's pretty expensive. I think the answer to your question is it kind of depends on the person and the situation but it was never meant to be a permanent subsidy; the goal was to give people assistance when they need it, and hopefully, they then can continue to work and generate higher levels of income and be able to afford housing. I think that's certainly true in more affordable places. I think the challenge is if you're trying to get to 2500 bucks a month in Seattle, you need a pretty darn good income. A good chunk of our homeless population in Seattle is employed, and we have an $18 minimum wage. There are people making 18 bucks an hour serving coffee at Starbucks who are living in their cars.
Richard Helppie
Well, the cost of transportation, the taxation on that $18, young people today are paying 2.9% in Medicare; when you and I were that age we weren't paying that at all so that top line wage is really a mirage. And they're really not getting that because what really trickles into spending. Frankly, we had a phone on our wall for four bucks a month and you bought a television and you got all your entertainment, you didn't have to buy a streaming service, or a cell phone, or a cell phone service, or an internet service. But those are essential services today to participate in the society. One of the things that as I read your book and I listened to you speak today - and it's a theme that we're developing on The Common Bridge - that the policy solutions go beyond economics, they go beyond politics; a lot of the greatness in this country was built because people had a heart, they had a soul. What's the right thing to do versus I bought into a particular ideology, either on the Right or on the Left. I've been an entrepreneur. I know that the innovation and things that come in the free market are things that were the envy of the world, all the inventions that we've made, yet it can't be the answer for everything. I've always said that one of the formulas for success, it's talent times effort plus luck, and not having luck, or having the wrong kind of luck can wipe out all the talent, effort doesn't matter. You get a breakdown, a medical condition, a loved one falls ill, whatever. There are many things that can happen. You get in a car wreck that wasn't your fault. Lots of different things that can happen. I think we need to get back to this: what do we want to be as a society. Do we want to make sure that everyone is cared for? Can we walk past our fellow human beings saying, well, I'm doing okay, I guess it's your problem, it must have been something you did. It's your mental illness. It's your addiction. It's your inability to get marketable skills. I just don't think that's the kind of society we need to be. We need to provide better answers. We had a recent guest, Zoe Kennedy, who heads a program where they're looking to reduce violence in the urban core and the funding comes from Washington. But the work's done locally, because they couldn't do the work as one size fits all from Washington, DC, and you couldn't possibly get the money together locally. I have high hopes because they're starting with where's our heart and what can we do to make this a better society. I think you're heading in that direction too. I hope that the book's been a great success. I will give Joe Biden a call this afternoon and tell him he needs to have you in his office [laughter]. Wait a minute, I don't have his number, you're going to have to go through someone else to do that. Gregg, this has been a great conversation. Are there any other possible approaches that you looked at? Again, I think you're pretty well balanced on public, private; it all makes sense. Any change is going to be uncomfortable, especially for some people who that change is being imposed on. Any other approaches that you looked at?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I would say that one of the cautions I have for West Coast cities is the temptation to construct massive shelter systems to get people off the streets. I think there's absolutely a role for shelter but I was just in New York City last week and the warning for LA, San Francisco and Seattle is that New York has warehoused people in shelters for now 30 years. They'll spend 10-15 years in shelter with no exit. That shelter system consumes billions of dollars a year. If we build shelter without figuring out how to get people out of that system, keep this flow of people, I think we might regret that. That's one thing where it's a warning I would give to West Coast cities who are facing this right now. That's fine, build more shelter capacity, but we've got to remember how are we going to get people out and that means housing. So like all knotty issues, there's not an easy silver bullet here. I always joke that as a professor, the answer is D, all the above; we need a little bit of a lot of these things. We need market rate housing, we need affordable, we need subsidized housing, we need short term solutions, we need long term solutions. If you only focus on one of them, it will undermine our ability to fix this. I think, and this is kind of a parting shot here, the purpose of the book is really to say, let's stop focusing on Joe on the street. When we walk by Joe saying, well, Joe made some poor decisions, therefore I can go about my day feeling good about myself; instead seeing that Joe's experience is the result of structure that we all play a role in. Once we recognize that then we can look in the mirror and say, what is Gregg Colburn going to do about this? Part of that is if someone's going to try to put up a multifamily housing unit in my [neighborhood] and I show up and say no, I'm contributing to the problem in a small way. Just the small changes that we can all make can have a ripple effect. That's my hope anyway but it's a big ask.
Richard Helppie
I like the way you framed it in your book talking about inflow, crisis, response and outflow. It gets right down the center of the mission of The Common Bridge, that we have solvable problems if we can have discussions. As we come to our close today, is there anything that we didn't cover? Is there any question I should have asked that I didn't?
Gregg Colburn
Well, I think the way that I conclude a lot of my talks, Rich, and I think this is important is for your listeners who are saying, I'm not convinced that housing is going to fix this - and that's a fair concern. When people say, how do you know that housing is going to help Joe who's a mess on the street? And the answer to that question is because we've done it. US government, leaders of both political parties decided they didn't want veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan to experience homelessness like the Vietnam generation did. And what did they do, they prioritized funding and resources to ensure that that wouldn't happen. And what happened, we cut veteran homelessness by 50% in ten years, which is a statistic that is not appreciated enough. This is a population with addiction and post traumatic stress and all sorts of behavioral health challenges. We got people out of homelessness and how did we do it? We gave them housing, in some cases was giving Rich a voucher because all you needed was a little support and you were off to the races. In some cases, maybe it's Gregg who has an addiction issue, and you gave me housing and supports to deal with my addiction issue. The question really isn't, do these interventions that we debate work? They work. We've demonstrated that they work. The question is will we expand those interventions to a broader population of people which, to date, the answer has been no, we're not going to. And we're seeing the consequences. We know it works the question is, do we have the political will, resource allocation dollars to do that? And to date, we've said no.
Richard Helppie
For my readers, listeners and viewers that are recoiling at the notion of people being given things like housing support or addiction support, absent that they end up either committing crimes or they end up for sure in the health care system, where it's far more expensive and drains very scarce resources and frankly, it just cycles through - a longer topic for a different day. We'll be talking about that during this season five of The Common Bridge. Professor Colburn, you've been very generous with your time, any closing statement for The Common Bridge?
Gregg Colburn
Well, no, just thank you for having me. I think your last point is really, really important. What I say to people when they say Gregg, these housing interventions are expensive. I'll say, you know what, you're right. You know what else is expensive? Untreated homelessness. We're paying for that already. It's just distributed through all these systems: health care, criminal justice, streets and sanitation, etc. So we're paying for it one way or another. I would prefer to pay for it and actually get people in housing and let them live a productive happy life. We're just not doing that right now, unfortunately. So thanks so much for having me and I wish you well.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking to Professor Gregg Colburn with his book "Homelessness is a Housing Problem," pick it up wherever you like to buy books. It's on Audible as well...I believe it's Audible that you're on. So get involved, talk to your legislators, focus on policy not the politics. With our guest, Gregg Colburn, this is your host Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
(Watch, Listen or Read) Homelessness is a Housing Problem.