Start here · Housing · A six-essay series
How to Think About Homelessness
Six short essays. Almost everything we believe about why people are homeless is a story about individuals: their addictions, their illnesses, their choices, the hospitals we once emptied. Most of the essays take one of those stories seriously, then ask what the evidence actually says.
These six essays share one idea. Almost every argument about homelessness mixes up two questions. Why did this person end up without a home? And why does this place have as many people without homes as it does?
Personal troubles (an addiction, an illness, bad luck) go a long way toward answering the first. They say almost nothing about the second. The size of the crowd is determined by something else: how many homes the households with the lowest incomes can actually afford. One thing explains who. A different thing explains how many.
Build too few homes within reach and the crowd grows; build enough and it shrinks. That's the thread running through all six.
Several words in these essays are used in a narrow, official sense. The count of homeless people doesn't include everyone without a home. Who counts as homeless depends on which law you're reading. To learn how each term is defined, and the law behind it where there is one, see Words the Agencies Use.
The same mistake, told several ways.
Most of these essays take on a version of the same belief: that homelessness is, fundamentally, a story about the people who fall into it. Every part of that story is real in someone's life, and none of it explains the count. The second essay comes at the belief from the other side and shows the shortage being made in plain view: a neighborhood of homes taken by policy, on purpose.
The count moves with what we build and fund, and that's the hopeful part. The count came down in Houston, which moved people who were already homeless into its relatively affordable apartments and helped pay the rent. It came down in Finland, which brought every level of government and the key organizations behind a national strategy that built and funded housing and services. Finland's count started rising again in 2024. These essays exist to point at housing, which both places relied on, so we stop pulling all the other levers without it and wondering why nothing changes.
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