FILE PHOTO - The homeless encampment on the Kelowna section of the Okanagan Rail Trial.

(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca)

It’s easy to point to drug policies, addiction and mental health as the main drivers of homelessness, but a Seattle researcher has shown that’s just not the case.

Data journalist Gregg Colburn, the co-author of the book "Homelessness is a Housing Problem", told a webinar hosted by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness this week that while his data is based on the U.S. situation, the concepts apply equally in Canada.

“It’s not that prescriptive events don’t matter,” the University of Washington associate professor said. “Whether they be mental illness, addiction, poverty, discrimination, whatever the case may be, they certainly do matter. They act as an identifying mechanism to identify people who are most likely to experience homelessness when housing is scarce.”

He and co-author neuroscientist and environmental journalist Clayton Page Aldern crunched the numbers with some surprising results.

Addictions and mental health issues are nationwide so there was no correlation between those factors and the rates of homelessness.

He pointed to West Virginia as an example. It’s the home of the U.S. opioid epidemic.

“It has ravaged that state. It has the highest overdose rate in the United States,” Colburn said. “They don’t have a problem with homelessness.”

Certainly, many homeless people are addicted to drugs but that just means they are more likely to become homeless in cities with few housing options and once people are living on the streets they are more likely to become or stay addicted.

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Weather is sometimes cited as a factor but the rates of homelessness in Los Angeles with its warm winters and Boston with its cold winters are about the same.

While people of colour are overrepresented amongst the homeless community that’s not a determining factor either, Colburn said.

Chicago has a much higher ratio of black residents than Seattle but Seattle’s homeless rate is about five times higher.

There was a better correlation to the rates of poverty and homelessness.

“But it’s in the opposite direction than we might typically suspect which is where poverty is high homelessness tends to be low,” Colburn said. “Detroit is the poorest city in the United States and has much lower rates of homelessness than really affluent places like Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Being poor in Seattle, which is a rich city, has different consequences than being poor in Detroit, where housing is much more affordable.”

That takes it down to the crux of the matter: high rents and low vacancy rates.

The big six cities in terms of high homeless rates in the U.S. are New York, Washington, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle. They all have vacancy rates ranging from 3.1% to 4.1%.

Charlotte, San Antonio and Austin have grown just as fast as the big six but have vacancy rates of 5.9% to 7.9% and, therefore, low rates of homelessness.

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“When vacancy rates get below 5% – which is considered the neutral point for a rental market where supply and demand are in equilibrium – when you get below 5% you will see homelessness rates go up pretty dramatically,” Colburn said.

The national vacancy rate in the U.S. is about 5%.

“Your nationwide vacancy rate of 1.5% is alarming, I don’t know how else to stress that,” Colburn told his Canadian audience. "I have never seen a national vacancy rate that low.”

So, what’s the solution?

In the U.S. there is a growing movement – which is heading to the Supreme Court this spring – to make homelessness illegal so cities can just bulldoze homeless camps.

A better solution is to change land use, Colburn said.

Most of the cities in the U.S. have a very high proportion of single-family homes. In Seattle, for example, 75% of properties are zoned single-family. That means, as more people move in, there's little room to build denser forms of housing, compound by geographic constraints of water and hills.

Colburn is calling for the kind of infill development that the BC government is pushing throughout the province with up to four housing units being allowed on most single-family lots.

Without a lot more housing that is affordable, the number of people being pushed into homelessness will continue to grow.

“Los Angeles got 25,000 people housed over the last couple years,” Colburn said. “At the same time, 30 to 40,000 fell into homelessness. So, the homeless numbers went up and the inflow into the crisis system overwhelmed the relatively good work they were doing of getting people out of shelters and out of unsheltered situations and into housing. And then the LA Times just looks at the overall number and says, obviously what we’re doing isn’t working because the numbers are going up.”

The situation is similar in Seattle, where Colburn lives.

“If you read the Seattle Times, there would be a different explanation for homelessness every day and the people of Seattle, understandably, are growing frustrated with a lack of progress,” he said. “As that frustration grows the community’s willingness to make the investments that we need to make starts to fall.”

While more housing units are vital, governments must take a role in providing affordable options.

That is not something that is likely to happen in the U.S. but the Canadian Alliance to End Homeless will be launching a national campaign next week in an effort to get more money for affordable housing into this spring’s federal budget.

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“This federal budget is our last best chance before the next election to get meaningful change from the federal government, to get meaningful investment in housing and meaningful investment in homelessness,” Tim Richter, the alliance’s CEO, said during the webinar.

“We want to have a federal strategy on homelessness. There hasn’t ever been one. There’s been a program but not a strategy of homelessness prevention, of housing benefits to hopefully slow the flow of people into homelessness.”

Go to the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness’ website, here.

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