Planning & Zoning - Regular Meeting

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Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Homelessness is a complex issue and it takes complex solutions. and it will take all of us to provide those solutions. Thank you for coming tonight. My name is John Munoz. And before I begin, I would like to thank you for taking time to spend with us today to discuss homelessness and also wanted to take this time to recognize my colleagues, some of our elected officials. So, Counselor Becky Curran, Councillor Cassie McClure. Absolutely. Councillor Joanna Vencomo. Councillor Michael Harris. And former Councillor Becky Curran, Becky. So let me talk a little bit about our keynote speaker today. Greg Colburn is a Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed University Professor and Associate Professor in the Run-Stand Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He's also a founder and director of the University of Washington Housing Futures Center. Greg publishes research on topics related to housing and homelessness, and is co-author of the book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem, How Structural Factors Explain US Patterns. Greg is also co-author of the recently released book, Affordable Housing in the United States. His research has been featured in leading media outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, and National Public Radio. Greg holds an MBA from Northwestern University and an MSW and PhD from the University of Minnesota. Prior to academia, Greg worked as an investment banker and a private equity professional. At the University of Washington, Greg teaches classes in housing, urban economics, and finance. Greg serves as the co-chair of the University of Washington's Homeless Research Initiative, and is a member of the National Alliance to End Homelessness Research Council. Please give a wonderful and warm Las Cruces welcome to Greg, who brought the rain with him from the Northeast. Thank you so much.

I had to wear my glasses up here so I could see the very small button that I had to slide over. Thank you, Mayor, for the introduction. Really appreciate the invitation. Natalie and team from the city, very, very warm welcome. I had a chance to visit Community of Hope this morning and got to see some of the good work being done there, and I really appreciate that. And I want to echo Mayor's comments about a thank you to you all. I've given about 200 of these talks around the United States and internationally, and people say, do you get bored of it? And my answer is no, I don't. Because every time I walk into the room and there are people taking time out of their day to learn about homelessness, it invigorates me. And so I really enjoy doing this. I enjoy the questions. I enjoy the critiques. I enjoy all the back and forth. Because I firmly believe that the more people who are at the table talking about this issue, the better. And so your being here tonight is an exercise in being at that table. So thank you. This is my third trip to New Mexico for this. I've been here personally. But I was in Albuquerque a couple years ago. I was in Santa Fe two years ago. And I'm actually going back to Santa Fe in October. So this is a big New Mexico fall for me. And I love the state. Great spot. And met a lot of good people who are thinking about these issues. And you obviously have challenges, but you're not alone. The one thing that I've learned on this kind of tour that I've been on for four years is that the problems that you're facing are not unique. The debates are not unique. The circumstances are not unique. And so I think there is a lot of learning to be had. And I do try to tell folks that while it's not ideal, there is comfort in the fact that you're not alone. The forces that are at work here are at play in Las Cruces and they're at play all over the place. So that's kind of my preamble here. So as mentioned in the introduction, I had a first career in finance. I was an investment banker and private equity investor. My friends joke that I'm probably the only person to have Goldman Sachs and homelessness on their CV. I think that's probably a true statement. and i was about to turn 40 and was sick and tired of doing what i was doing and had always had an interest in becoming a professor and so i quit and i wanted to study housing and so people say like why'd you quit why'd you decide to study housing and i give kind of one or two responses depending on my mood you know one response is i think that housing is foundational when i entered graduate school people told me not to study housing i said you'll never get a job Okay, well, that's interesting. What should I study? Poverty, health care, education. All of those things are super important. But if you don't have housing, all those things are compromised. So if we think about this from a Maslow perspective, if you go back to high school health class, Maslow's hierarchy, you have to have basic needs met and then we can approach self-actualization. So for my colleagues who study education, if we want a kid to learn geometry, I'm all for geometry. Let's make sure that kid's housed. Learning geometry without housing ain't gonna happen. If we want an elder to be healthy, if we want to care for an elder as they age, let's make sure that elder's housed. The fastest growing percentage of the homeless population in the United States is people over 55 years old. Why is that? My theory, I haven't studied this, is that Social Security has been an amazing safety net program. It is no longer enough. The cost of housing has outstripped the benefits provided by Social Security, and there are people who have been stably housed their whole lives showing up at the shelter door saying, I can't do it anymore. I don't know anyone, regardless of ideology, who wants to see seniors showing up at the shelter door. That is just unacceptable. The second reason, and when I'm feeling a little less benevolent when people say, well, Greg, why do you study homelessness? It's because I am outraged that in the wealthiest country in the history of this planet that we have so many people living without a house. It's totally unnecessary. This is a problem that we can absolutely solve in my lifetime. I'm 54. If you want to give me another 40 years, I'll take it. This is a problem we could fix in 40 years. We have a roadmap, and we've done it with certain populations. We just haven't done it. beyond that. There are other social problems that we'll be wrestling with long beyond my time on this earth. We've been dealing with them for hundreds of years. They're probably going to keep going. This is one that we could stop. But we do need to make different decisions than we are right now. With that background of kind of my unique trajectory on this issue, my family and I moved to Seattle when I got a job at the University of Washington in 2017. So this is my 10th academic year at UW. And when I moved there, there weren't a lot of people at the University of Washington studying housing. So I got invited to every meeting you could imagine. And these are meetings that you all are going to here in Las Cruces. They're elected leaders, and the CEO of this company, advocates and you name it, planners and citizens who are irritated. So being the new guy, I just sat there because I didn't know the dynamics, who likes who, who doesn't like each other, you know how this works. I would just sit and listen and I'd read the Seattle Times and I would just leave and say, I don't think we understand what's going on. We understand that there's a problem. We understand that the problem's getting worse. We're all getting irritated. And if you were to read the Seattle Times every day, there would be a different explanation for homelessness. And if you haven't been to Seattle recently, we've got a big problem. Real big problem. And so as I was kind of navigating this, I was saying, you know, we're playing whack-a-mole with different explanations and people are getting irritated. We're spending X million dollars, the problem's getting worse. Why would we keep spending these dollars? Have you ever heard this argument? Right? Every place does. Literally every place is having this argument. And so I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, you know, I kind of want to write this book translating what we've known in the academic literature for some time. And he said, I think you should. So I went to my dean, which is not something you usually do when you just start and like, I want to pause my other stuff and write this book. And she said, go for it. So I did. And this is the result. I told someone earlier today that I did not write this book for other professors. I wrote this, actually I had my parents in mind when I wrote this book. So my parents are college educated. They're not social scientists. They don't know fancy statistics. But they read the newspaper and they care about the world. And I wanted to write it in a way that if they picked it up, they could understand it. And so that was kind of the purpose of the book. And so it's partly an exercise in new research, but it's partly just a translational exercise of just saying, this is kind of what we known and this is how we wanna present it to someone who is walking around Seattle saying, what the heck is going on? It's really bad here. Yeah, it is. And I was just in Chicago and it wasn't like this. Why is that? That's really the question that we attempt to answer in the book. The other thing that was really surprising is I didn't think anyone was going to read the book. I knew my parents would because they have to. They love me. They did read it, but so did a bunch of other people, and I got invited to speak all over the place. It has been one of the great privileges of my professional life to travel around to all these places. I thought I'd go to San Francisco and L.A. and Seattle and Boston and be done, but I've been to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was in Fresno, California last week. I'm going to Independence, Missouri in October. All over the place. And what's really, really interesting is I learned something in each place, and I also learned that, frankly, we're not that different. The circumstances are a little different in each place, but the same debates are happening. They're just at a different scale. So it's been really a huge, huge privilege. I've also had a chance to travel internationally. I was in Australia, did a three-city tour, and I basically said, you are like 10 years behind us. This was three years ago. I was like, all your stuff is going in the wrong direction, and what's happening now is Sydney homelessness is blowing up. And I didn't like to be right about that one, but it's just, the forces are pretty powerful. It felt like being in San Francisco 15 years ago. That's what Sydney felt like. And they're well on their way now. So I want to do a little bit of housing context. People say, well, Greg writes books about homelessness. I was like, well, I write books about homelessness, but this is really a housing book. Homelessness is the outcome that we're concerned about, but this is really a book more about housing. So I want to provide a little bit of context. This is per capita production of housing in the United States going back to 1970. guess maybe just before 1970 oddly enough my birth here in 1972 is the peak of housing production in the united states okay and since that time we have been on a steady decline the huge drop is the great financial crisis 2007 to 2009 when basically everything shut down capital markets shut down i was managing a billion dollar fund at the time i remember that well it sucked okay and what happened is we dug ourselves a huge hole and we're slowly digging our way out of that And so what's fascinating though is when you think about the 1970s, my parents bought our first home in the 1970s. What was your mortgage? Like 15%, 18%, right? And we were building a heck of a lot more housing then on a per capita basis than we are now and we're freaking out about 7% mortgages. Lots of different things going on to explain that. We don't need to get sidetracked by that. But the point being is that we have a history of building more housing in the United States, and we haven't done that. The consequences of this have been significant. I have a lot of time on planes. And one of the things that I decided to do on one of my plane flights was to kind of help to frame this conversation for people who say, like, I'm interested in this, but I don't care about homelessness. One, I hope you do care about homelessness. But even if you don't, there are a lot of things that we want to think about here. The red apple in the middle is what I'm calling the housing crisis. And this is true all over the country. Two of the outcomes of a housing crisis are really high rents and low vacancies. Not enough housing, and the housing that we do have is too expensive. And so what are the consequences of that? One, the yellow box is homelessness. I'm going to make that argument for you tonight. But there are also a bunch of other ones. Political conflict. Has anyone been to a city council meeting recently talking about housing? Right? Exactly. No, everything's fine. Right? Immobility. Right? Right? There have been people in the Rust Belt of the United States who have not moved for 30 years because they couldn't afford to move to Seattle even though they have lots of jobs. Why? Because the housing is too expensive. Our daughter graduated from college. She'd love to be in Seattle. She's not. Housing costs a big reason. And her mom cries every night. Not every night. But the point being, it disrupts family units when housing gets really expensive. Long commutes. No one wakes up and says, I want a two-hour commute. Why do we have two-hour commutes in some metro areas? Because housing is too darn expensive. And so, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Inequality. I am the beneficiary of the housing crisis. I'll say that again. I'm the beneficiary of the housing crisis. We bought a house in Seattle in 2017, and it was terribly expensive. And now, it's two times as expensive. So while people have been squeezed by the increase in rents in Seattle, my balance sheet continues to look better and better each day. massive disparities and housing plays a big role in that because household wealth is a big contributor, excuse me, housing equity is a big contributor into household wealth in the United States. We can argue about whether that's the right system or the wrong system, that's what it is. So anyway, We're gonna talk about this housing crisis producing homelessness tonight, but I also want you to think about all these other consequences of people not being able to live where they wanna live or they have household budgets where I'm not spending money on X because I gotta pay for Y. The rent eats first, right? People say that all the time. I gotta pay rent and then whatever else is left over, I'll pay for food and healthcare and transportation and movies or whatever entertainment I wanna do. Okay, so back to homelessness. One of the real challenges with homelessness is when we ask a simple question like what causes homelessness, that's a simple question with a super complicated answer. In the academy, we would call it complex causation. A whole bunch of things come together to produce an outcome. What also complicates this is we can think about this at the individual level. What would cause, what's a risk factor for homelessness for Greg? Or we can think about it at a community level saying, what's a risk factor for homelessness in Seattle or New York or Boston, okay? one of the ways that we understand homelessness is we ask people who are experiencing homelessness or have experienced homelessness why are you homeless that seems to make sense right I have never had that experience in my life I've been stably housed my whole life been very fortunate okay so when you ask people why are you homeless what do they say they give you all sorts of answers right my boyfriend beat me up and I ran now I'm homeless domestic violence i drink too much i made some poor decisions lost my job okay got to fight with my roommate she kicked me out got divorced all of these are true right they told us they're not lying okay but when i see this and the seattle times publish this and say here are the causes of homelessness i kind of go I wrestle with that a little bit because context matters. If my wife and I got divorced tonight, and I certainly hope it doesn't happen, if we did, neither of us would be homeless tomorrow. We would figure it out. So relational breakdown in one set of circumstances can obviously produce homelessness. In another set of circumstances, it's just a painful disruption in an otherwise comfortable life. So we can't say that divorce causes homelessness. What we can say is divorce in certain contexts does cause homelessness. So what we try to do in this book, and actually one of the big things that scared me before I'd even put a word on the page was I knew I'd be standing here with a white shirt and a blue blazer because this is what I wear all the time. I have more than one. I just want you to know. Is I'm up here saying it's a housing market, and there might be a woman next to me saying it's domestic violence. Who am I to tell that woman that that's not her truth? And so what we try to do with this book is to differentiate root causes and precipitating events, both of which are true. We don't put them in competition. What we do is they're complementary understandings for this phenomenon. And the way that we do that is this metaphor of musical chairs. So you know the game. 10 friends come together to play the game. There's a leader. The leader starts playing music. Everyone's walking around in a circle. The leader stops the music, excuse me, the leader pulls one chair out, we're down to nine chairs. Leader stops the music, everyone scrambles, and by definition, someone loses. In this case, the loser was Mike who'd sprained his ankle, he was on crutches, he couldn't move quickly when the music stopped, and he lost the game, not terribly surprisingly. If we interviewed Mike after the game and said, Mike, why don't you have a chair? Why'd you lose the game? What would you say? Had a bad ankle. Sure enough, everyone would nod, of course, that's why he lost the game. If we ask a different question, though, is why didn't he have a chair? It's because we did not have 10 chairs. Had we had 10 chairs, Mike would have found a chair. It might have taken him longer, it might not have been pretty, but he would have found a chair. And so scarcity accentuates vulnerability. That's one way to think about this. And so while simplistic, this is what's going on in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles every day, which is when housing is scarce There aren't enough chairs. Who's going to lose the game? People were vulnerable. And then we see Joe on the street on 3rd Avenue in Seattle, and there's a needle next to him, and we say, of course Joe's homeless. He's addicted. Certainly part of the story. But if there was more housing and more housing available that had the services needed, Joe wouldn't necessarily need to be on 3rd Avenue. And this happens day after day after day in cities all around the United States. And so what we observe with our senses, with our eyesight is the vulnerability and therefore we say that's homelessness. And that's certainly a big part of it, an important part of it, but we don't see the structural deficit of housing when we're walking down Third Avenue in Seattle. So the purpose of the book was to bring that into the conversation, not to exclude behavioral health, but to bring the housing side into the conversation. Because at least in our city, we were disproportionately talking about behavioral health and not the structural deficit of housing that was causing all sorts of problems, homelessness, long commutes. My wife crying because our daughter's not living there. All these consequences of the housing crisis. So I've also learned that people get very irritated with this argument. And that's okay. I am not here suggesting that drug use and mental illness aren't issues. Of course they are. Would our society be better off if we had a more robust response to those issues? Of course. Stipulate it. If I were an attorney, I would just stipulate that. We don't need to argue about that. If you are addicted, if you are mentally ill, if you're poor, you're more likely to experience homelessness. Your risk factors are much, much higher. Totally true. But we also know that those conditions exist in every city in the United States, and cities have very, very different experiences with homelessness. So that should cause us to kind of scratch our head and say, so what's going on? That's the purpose of this book. The other thing that I think is really important when we think about homelessness is all of us are to a certain extent guilty of this, which is the image of homelessness is shaped by our personal experience. And who do we see? We see someone on the street who's in crisis, and that, therefore, is homelessness. And that's an important part of the population. that deserves support and care from my perspective. But that is what is the tip of the iceberg. That's the part that we see. What we don't see is the women and children in shelter, the people who are sleeping in their vans in Seattle, showering at the YMCA and going to work, the people who are sleeping on your couch because you were kind enough to let me sleep there for a night. There are all these people who are hidden from us who account for a big chunk of the homeless population, yet we don't really think about them because they're not part of our lived experience every day when we're just walking around. So we end up then thinking about that tip of the iceberg and saying, that's what we're going to focus on and we're going to write newspaper articles about and take pictures and talk about at parties.

There's more to it.

I am all for dealing with chronic unsheltered homelessness and people in crisis, absolutely, but I'm also for dealing with women and children in shelter and the folks who are sleeping in their cars. So the question we pose in the book is why do rates of homelessness vary so widely throughout the United States? My city has five times the per capita homelessness of Chicago, which is massive variation. It's not 20% more or 30% more, it's five times. We should wanna know the answer to that question, and I think if, because if we can answer that question, it should tell us something fundamental about the nature of this phenomenon. That's why we ask the question. Many people have made the argument that we know that there are vulnerabilities for homelessness, behavioral health and poverty. Therefore, if we have more people with those conditions, we'll have more homelessness. That would probably get an A in a logic class. It makes perfect logical sense, and it turns out that it's not true. Doesn't stop people from making the argument, but it's not true. And I'm gonna show you the data to demonstrate that. So this is a book about cities, not about people. This doesn't mean that person-focused research isn't important, but this is focused on what the heck is going on in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Boston, New York, DC. And our thesis is that tight housing markets accentuate vulnerabilities and produce homelessness at much higher levels. And these individual factors that receive a lot of time and attention in the newspaper are really sorting mechanisms. They're helping to identify the people who are going to lose the game when housing is scarce. This vicious game of musical chairs. In Seattle, we're the home of Amazon. Amazon has radically changed our city. Massive wealth boom. I have a lot of friends who work at Amazon. Not one of them is experiencing homelessness. They all found housing. And so what I describe it as, finding housing in Seattle is like playing musical chairs with Usain Bolt. Do you remember Usain Bolt? Jamaican sprinter, fastest man in the world. He's going to win every time, right? The Amazon people are going to win every time. If you're vulnerable in Seattle and competing against someone making 500 grand a year who's writing code at Amazon, you're going to lose. That person's going to find housing. They have resources, they can pay more than you, etc. Okay, so this is gonna be a little small. It's also into the evening, so I'll tell you what you're looking at here. The sample in our book is the 30 largest metros in the United States. The book was published in 2022. It was based on data through 2019. I've since updated it. There's not a new book, but I've updated the data. Basically, the gist is everything holds. The story is the same with the post-2019 data, unfortunately. What this shows is that there are places in the United States, cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC that have way more homelessness than Chicago. That's the variation that we're interested in in this book. There's some places that count at the county level, not the city level. There's a bureaucratic nuance that isn't important. Multnomah County is Portland, LA County, King County is Seattle. Way more homelessness than Hillsboro, which is Tampa. So the purpose of the book is to explain this variation using pretty simple statistics. And the logic of the book is we'll take an explanation for homelessness, test it, and say, does this help us understand this variation? If it doesn't, we cross it off and we move to the next one and just work our way through the book. And I'm not going to do all of them tonight because you have better things to do. But I'll give you enough to kind of give you a sense of the argument. Okay, so we're gonna start with individual explanations because fundamentally, this is a situation that affects individuals that we care about. And I like to start with poverty because at its root, homelessness is a poverty problem. If you are poor, you're way more likely to experience homelessness. There's no doubt about that. Put another way, if you have ample resources, you're not gonna experience homelessness. So being poor is a risk factor for homelessness, but what's really interesting is when you plot poverty rates, which means the share of the population that's below the federal poverty line, what you'll see is places with really high rates of poverty, think Detroit and Cleveland, when I talk about really poor cities, those are the two most impoverished cities in the United States, by far. St. Louis, Buffalo, kind of the Rust Belt has been hit really hard. What you'll see is they have far lower rates of homelessness than our nation's richest cities, where there's very little poverty. Our richest cities, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco, have far lower rates of homelessness than our nation's poorest cities. Well, that's weird, because Greg, you just told me that poverty causes homelessness. It does, at the individual level. At the community level, homelessness thrives amidst affluence. Okay? If you leave with one point, that's what I would leave with. And so as your community grows and thrives and becomes more affluent, there are a lot of good things that come from that. The budget works better when we're growing and people are paying taxes. One of the consequences is more homelessness. So we can't blame the problem in Seattle on disproportionate numbers of poor people. We actually have fewer poor people than a lot of other places in the United States. We have a $20 minimum wage. Half the people in the Seattle shelter system are employed at 20 bucks an hour. Math doesn't work. So this also doesn't mean that poverty doesn't matter. What it means is that being poor in an affluent place has very different consequences. If you're poor living in Detroit, it's no picnic. But through familial support, public assistance, low-wage labor, you might be able to get to $600, $700 a month in rent. If rent's $2,500, you got no shot. That's the story. All right, this is when people's blood pressure starts to rise. So we can all just take a deep breath here. This is rates of serious mental illness in every state in the nation plotted against rates of homelessness. What you will see is there is no statistical relationship between these two numbers, meaning there are people with serious mental illness in every state in the country. And it's not, there aren't more mentally ill people in places with lots of homelessness. Do we have mentally ill people in California and Oregon and Washington? Of course. Is our behavioral health response adequate? Nowhere near adequate. But there are mentally ill people in Missouri and Kansas and Kentucky as well. So this doesn't mean that we shouldn't respond to behavioral health challenge. What it means is we can't blame the problem in Seattle on disproportionate numbers of people who are experiencing mental illness. The same thing holds true for drug use. There's a modest relationship The R squared here is 0.1, which is modestly in the post-2020 period. Pre-2020 is 0.06. Statistically speaking, this is a very, very weak relationship. People say, Greg, how dare you suggest this isn't a drug problem? I just saw Joe on Third Avenue, and there was a needle next to him. I was like, you're right.

You're right.

But do you think people use drugs in Chicago? They do. And what's the biggest drug problem in the United States over the last 20 years? West Virginia, opioid epidemic. Highest overdose death rate in the United States is West Virginia, and it has been for a long time. If this fundamentally were a drug problem, we should see massive rates of homelessness in West Virginia and Mississippi and Arkansas and Louisiana, but we don't. And it's not to minimize that crisis. It has ravaged those communities. But if this were fundamentally driven by that, we should see massive rates of homelessness, and we aren't. What's going on? They're figuring it out. They're finding housing. It's not pretty, but they're figuring it out. And so if you combine an addiction with a really inhospitable housing market, that's a recipe for disaster, and that's the deal that's going on right now. The other thing that's super important, and the research is very clear on this, is that we have bidirectionality of causation. Greg, please stop saying these words. Bidirectionality of causation means that my addiction certainly might cause me to experience homelessness. I become addicted, my life falls apart, I lose my job, this and that, and next thing you know, I'm being helped by people who are willing to help me. Equally likely is, I experience homelessness. I'm now living on the street in Seattle, and you leave me there for three years, and all of a sudden, I'm not medicating with red wine anymore, which is my current medication. We know that drug use is a response to the trauma of experiencing unsheltered homelessness. The experiences of people who experience unsheltered homelessness, it is brutal. The research will make you cry. And so the fact that someone ends up then with a behavioral health challenge after being on the streets for three years, pardon my French, I always say, well, no shit. It's a natural human response to this trauma. And do I want less open-air drug markets in Seattle? Yeah. Do I want less people going to the bathroom on the sidewalk? Yes. I'm with you. And how are we going to do that? Well, maybe we should get people into some housing such that they don't need to be in crisis on the streets. That's my view. We have huge racial disparities in the homeless population. Black, brown, indigenous folks are three to four times overrepresented in the homeless population. What's interesting though is when you plot, in this case, the share of people who are black or African American in the city, there's a negative relationship. Cities with a higher black population actually have lower per capita rates of homelessness, which seems inconsistent because I was just talking about racial disparities. The way I explain this is that race doesn't cause homelessness. It just doesn't. Being black doesn't cause homelessness. Racism causes homelessness, which is why people of color are overrepresented in every city, in Las Cruces, in Seattle, in Chicago, in Jackson, Mississippi, in Boston. It's because all of these systems that we know about come together to produce disparate outcomes. Criminal justice, education, healthcare, labor market, all that kind of stuff. And if you do that for 400 years, what do you get? A tragic but not surprising result, which is people of color being disproportionately represented in the homeless population. But it doesn't explain the regional variation point. Race doesn't explain why Seattle is more homelessness than Chicago. Seattle's a disproportionately white city. OK. So none of these individual explanations have helped us understand the question that we pose in the book. So we're still looking. This is the, I jokingly refer to this as the cocktail party conversation portion of the talk. So since writing this book, it's kind of entertaining that I'll go to an event, drinking my red wine, People will talk about how much their home is worth or complain about homelessness. That's what people do in Seattle. And then someone will say, well, Greg wrote a book on that. And then pretty soon, there's a circle of people lecturing me on the causes of homelessness. And my wife is, oh, bless her. She's been through this a bunch. And so people are then telling me what causes homelessness. My best friend has a PhD in physics. No one lectures him on physics. When he learns that, they're like, oh, that's cool, physics. But I have a PhD in public policy focusing on housing. And they're like, Greg, I'm going to tell you what the deal is. They're like, OK. Well, I'd love to hear. Actually, I don't. But I'll listen. So Greg, Chicago is cold. LA is warm. Of course LA is going to have more homelessness. Has anyone ever heard this argument? Yeah, sure. OK. Supposedly, they come here because it's warm. Well, exactly. Exactly. It is true. I lived in Chicago for 10 years. Chicago is colder. There's no doubt about that. But there are also cold places that have tons of homelessness. New York and Boston are no picnic in January. And there are plenty of warm places in the United States that don't have high rates of homelessness, in Arizona, in Texas, in Florida. And so we want to blame Mother Nature. And I fundamentally believe we want to blame Mother Nature because then we don't have to look in the mirror. I think that's why we want to do that. It's out of our hands. It's Mother Nature. When people make the argument in Seattle, it's like, have you ever been to Seattle in January when it's 40 degrees and rainy? It's miserable. I don't want to be on the street. I don't want to be on the street in any weather. But that's no picnic. We can't blame Mother Nature. Greg, if we stopped being so generous or we stopped having nice weather, people would stop moving here. I heard this first in Minneapolis. I was working on my PhD. People were blaming folks from Chicago who were moving to Minneapolis to experience homelessness. We studied it and we found no evidence. I moved to Seattle, the first meeting I was in. Greg, people are moving here to experience homelessness because we're generous. I said, well, that's what Minneapolis said. And I said, where are your people coming from? California. Okay. I'm in meetings in California. What's the first thing they said? We're a magnet for homelessness. I said, you can't be. You're sending your people to Seattle. They just told me. And I said, well, California, where are your people coming from? Texas. We love to blame Texas for things, don't we? Middletown, Ohio. I'm sure it's a lovely place. We write about them in the book. They believe that they're a magnet for homelessness. And with all due respect to the wonderful people, I don't believe it for a second. This is welfare generosity by state. We do not see people congregating in generous states. People are not saying, look at the TANF welfare benefits in Iowa. I think I'm going to move 2,000 miles and disrupt my life for an extra $200 a month. It doesn't make any logical sense. When we talk about generous benefits, let's be clear. It's like $800 instead of $700. It's not like they're making $200,000 a year in Iowa. So we know from the academic literature that low-income mobility is really high. People move a lot, but it tends to be local because they tend to be renters. Leases are one year. State-to-state mobility falls for lower-income folks. Higher-income folks move state-to-state. Why? It's hard and it's expensive. We moved a family of four from Minneapolis to Seattle in 2017, and it sucked. It really did. It was hard. We had people who loved and cared for us there. I had a job I liked. The kids had friends. So we had to move to Seattle, find a house which was no picnic, find new friends, new job, new schools for the kids. It was painful. And we had every advantage under the sun. Now imagine you're at the end of the rope and you're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to move across the country. Not going to happen. If your mom or your dad takes care of your kid when you go to work, are you going to leave and go to Topeka, Kansas? Because it's cheaper? It's not going to happen. Is there an anecdote about someone moving from Indianapolis to LA? Sure. There's an anecdote all the time. We should not legislate based on anecdotes. My friend Margo Cushell, we're writing a book together right now. She did the huge study of homelessness in California. They interviewed thousands of people. What did they find? 90% of the people who are experiencing homelessness in California are from California. So we could build a giant wall around California and never let another person in, and they'd still have a ton of homelessness. So we can wring our hands and worry about the couple people who are moving, or we can kind of say, there's something going on in California that we should focus on. If we're looking at bang for our buck, that's a much better bang for our buck than worrying about folks from Indiana moving to LA. Okay, so given the title of the book, you're probably not going to be terribly surprised with the conclusions that we reach. One of the scary things about writing a book, which I didn't think about before I decided to write a book, was people can write book reviews. So unfortunately, they've been very positive, but I will say it's a somewhat vulnerable experience because you're kind of putting your ideas out there. I once saw an interview with Steven Spielberg, and he talked about how he gets nervous every time a new movie comes out. I was like, you're Steven Spielberg. What do you have to worry about? The point is that it's a vulnerable thing when someone says, I hate this movie. It stinks, even for Steven Spielberg. I know what he's talking about. So this one hit my inbox one day. This is from a professor at Indiana University, Fran Quigley. I knew who Fran was, but I didn't know him. Greg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldrin would make lousy mystery writers. With zero effort at deception, they happily give away their thesis with the book titled Homelessness is a Housing Problem. I thought that was pretty good. I sent them a note. I said, you win the award for best opening sentence to a book review. We are not trying to fool anyone. This is not a cliffhanger. This is the relationship between rent and homelessness. And what you'll see is a very convincing positive relationship where rents are high, homelessness is high.

Dun, dun, dun.

No one's giving us a Nobel Prize for this. This is vacancy rates, rental market vacancy rates. When vacancy rates get really low, what that means is you don't have enough rental housing. When vacancy rates are low, homelessness rates tend to be high. This is a pretty simple model, but there is not an exception to this rule. Every place in the United States that has really high rents and low vacancies has a big problem with homelessness. So it should at least, in my opinion, be part of this conversation because there is not an exception to that rule. And so as I'm seeing and I'm traveling in the country, what I'm getting really worried about is I'm seeing places like Indianapolis and Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Green Bay, Wisconsin, where their vacancy rates are going down and rents are going up. It's happening here too. And they're saying, you know, we're starting to see more homelessness. And I'm like, yep. I'm sorry that you're seeing that, but it shouldn't come as a surprise because the data have told us that this is a problematic relationship. So why do we have places with really high rents and low vacancies? This is my favorite chart in the book. The change in population at the bottom, I want you to think about that as demand for housing. The more people who move to a community, the more demand for housing you'll have. The y-axis or the vertical axis is something that economists call supply elasticity, and we're not going to get into that tonight. The point is that higher numbers means that you build more housing. And some places build a lot more housing than other places because of two factors. One is the regulatory environment. Some places it's easier to build than others. And topography, if you have mountains and water, it's harder to build more housing. So think of San Francisco, it is probably one of the most inelastic markets in the United States. Mountains and water makes it beautiful, but really hard to build, and the regulatory environment is exceedingly difficult. Years to get a permit to build housing, which irritates me to no end. People are dying in the street and we're taking three years to provide a permit to build housing? Unacceptable. Unacceptable. It doesn't mean I'm opposed to regulation, there's a role for that, but it shouldn't be taken three years. What happens is, what you'll see is there's Sunbelt cities that have grown in the decade of 2010s just as fast as Seattle and San Francisco, but they built a whole bunch of housing and they were able to accommodate that growth. Part of the reasons is they were able to sprawl, San Antonio can sprawl a lot easier than Seattle can. But they built the units, it helped. The perfect storm for a homelessness crisis, housing and homelessness crisis is the bottom right quadrant, which is where my city finds itself. Whole bunch of people move there, You don't build much housing. What happens? The numbers in parentheses are their rental market vacancy rates. That's over an entire decade, Seattle had a 3% vacancy rate. That is terribly low. That is a recipe for rents just going to the moon. So the way I describe this is, this is a tragic outcome, but 100% predictable. And shame on us, because we watched San Francisco go through it ahead of us. We pat ourselves on the back. We're not as bad as San Francisco, and now we kind of are. So since the book came out, what have the data told us? Basically, the logic holds. And unfortunately, it's holding in more places. Phoenix and Austin and Sacramento County and Vegas and Denver are all exhibiting housing markets that are starting to look a lot more like our coastal cities. And you'll see a lot of them are in the west. And then we still have our problem children, the big six. The problem hasn't gone away there. What's the response been to the book? Generally speaking, overwhelmingly positive. It's been, as I said, just a huge, selfishly speaking, just really gratifying to be invited to really cool places and talk about homelessness. It's been really fun. There is a segment of the population who is less enthused. So on the right is the cover of our book. I checked my mailbox at the University of Washington. There was an envelope with no return address. And they'd cut the cover off the book and said, homelessness is a 75% mental health addiction problem. Greg, take off your woke goggles to solve the problem. OK. From Boise, Idaho. That was the postmark. Recently, I had to leave Twitter a long time ago because people were posting my home. And it was terrible. Those of you in elected office know this. That's not what I signed up for, but I kind of got. So I have some people kind of look out for me on Twitter, and they sent this to me recently. This is someone who works in the homeless response system in Seattle. Greg studies housing policy. Greg is the author of this book that Washington elected leaders have turned to as their solutions manual. This book has misguided policymakers nationwide and killed our loved ones. Buy this book and post pictures of you burning it. Which felt a little much. As my wife said, well, she did say buy the book. So... And so I kind of want to say to people, like, why are you so angry? I'm angry because too many people are on the streets. Why are you so angry at someone saying that homelessness is the state of not having a house, and therefore the ability to get housing is part of the story here? I don't understand that. I don't understand that. But it exists. How are we responding as a... You know, federal government, state, and locally. I would say not great would be my, you know, kind of D plus if I were grading it. Two years ago, the Supreme Court heard a case, the Grants Pass case, determining whether we can criminalize sleeping on public land. It was determined that yes, we can. So that's the law of the land. Okay? We have a lot of state action, particularly in the South, anti-camping legislation that's happening in state legislatures all throughout the United States that are, you know, you can either call it, well, there are a variety of different framings of this, but ultimately it's an anti-camping bill. Some might call it a criminalization bill, right, depending on one's perspective. I have a Google alert for my name and the name of the book. It's kind of fascinating to see how it's being used. This came from Oklahoma. And there was a legislator there who was proposing an anti-camping bill. The journalist apparently had read our book and asked this representative, Representative Weaver, do you feel like homelessness is a housing problem? He said, it could be. I mean, it could be if they don't have any place to live. OK. So even people who want to criminalize understand at its core that housing is part of the story here. This was a New York Times article talking about what's going on in Utah, where they are building a massive, massive facility on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. And this is not said in jest, but in all seriousness, we as a species do not have a great track record of building giant camps and putting people in them. I think we have ample evidence to say that this hasn't worked real well. but we're gonna do it again, okay? This very much concerns me. This isn't fixing the problem, it's just moving it. Is this hopeless? It's not hopeless. I had the privilege to sit down with the Secretary of HUD in 2024. There were 20 of us who were invited to talk about housing policy. And when she said, well, what would you do if you were me? And I said, well, I would scream from the highest mountaintop about the success that we've had with veteran homelessness. As a nation, we cut veteran homelessness by 55% in a decade. And most people don't recognize that. How did we do it? We provided housing plus services. And why did we do it? It's good politics to house veterans. And I'm all for housing veterans. My grandpa was in World War II. My dad's a veteran. Fantastic. I'm also for housing people who aren't veterans. That's where we drew the line. We had political will and resources, and we provided housing support and services, and we had huge success. Did it fix everything? No. But 55% at a national level is a pretty remarkable achievement. And so where we have scale and where we have political will, we can really make progress. And so what I said to the secretary was, we're not walking around blindfold in the woods looking for a solution. It's literally right in front of us. We're just choosing not to take it. That's our failure. The failure is not a lack of an intervention. The failure is our response. We're seeing success in local jurisdictions, St. Paul and Denver and Chattanooga, and people are making progress. Denver's had a terrible problem. And their mayor stood up after he got elected and said, I'm going to stake my mayorship on this. We're going to get 1,000-plus people off the streets into temporary housing. And he did. Gutsy move, because if that doesn't work, we'll see you, bud. Now, the job's not done. They can't keep him in this temporary housing forever, but the point being, like, he wanted to put points in the scoreboard. I'm a big sports fan. Put points in the scoreboard, and then you get a little bit of goodwill. Mayor Johnston put points in the scoreboard in Denver, which then allowed him to take the next step. We have been taking points off the scoreboard in Seattle, which makes things really, really challenging. So we have success, why do we have so much skepticism? This is a political cartoon from the Seattle Times. I've been basically making this argument for a long time before the cartoon showed up. It is a picture of an encampment. The top one is 2015, homelessness in King County before billions of tax dollars were spent on the problem. It's exact same image below 2025, homelessness in King County after billions of dollars were spent. Because the scale of our response has been inadequate, we have exposed ourselves to this argument. And it's a fair argument. I'm walking around Seattle. I am not seeing progress enough. So shame on us for allowing that argument to take hold. Had we scaled the interventions that we know work, we would have had progress and people would have said, OK, I'm on board. We haven't done that.

What's going on here?

What we see here is this is rental market vacancy rates, both locally and at the state level. And what you're seeing is a pretty troubling decline in vacancy rates over the last 10 years. Those of you who are living here doing this, you understand this, but you can see a decade ago, you're hovering around nine. It went up over 10, which is a pretty loose market. And now what we're seeing kind of post pandemic is below 5%. And you are tighter than the rest of the state in this community. That's a problem. What's happened to rents? Not a surprise. What do you see? You see this rocket ship taking off as soon as vacancies went down. This is exactly what economists would predict, which is when rental vacancies are low, rents go up. And so we now have gone from 2018, when this was a relatively affordable community, to a place where it's not terribly affordable. And so if you have some issue, and instead of now trying to come up with $700 a month, you need to come up with $1,100. And this is based on the census data I was talking to someone earlier. The numbers are actually in many cases higher than this. But this is kind of the blended for all, including studios and small units and all that kind of stuff. The point being, you're up a lot on a percentage basis over the last five years. So the fact that you're seeing more people showing up saying, I got a problem, isn't surprising. It's tragic, but not surprising. So one of the things that this book is really about explaining why so many people are entering homelessness. Another question is what to do once people are experiencing homelessness. And so people many times equate those two things. I am far more experienced and expert in the first one than the second one. There are other people who are better at caring for people once they're experiencing homelessness. And I'm saying go for it. A crisis response system to me is a marker of a caring society. But we blame the system all the time for ongoing homelessness. The analogy that I like to use is if you break your arm and go to the emergency room, what happens? They come in and say, Greg, what happened? I fell out of a tree and broke my arm. What do they do? They put a cast on my arm and send me home. The next day, someone else is going to show up with a broken arm because they did something dumb. And what happens? They put a cast on that person's arm. We would never say that the emergency room is at fault for all these people breaking their arms. If the emergency room were better, we wouldn't have all these people breaking their arms. That's not the way it works. Yet when people show up and are cared for or experiencing homelessness, we blame the crisis response system for ongoing homelessness, which logically doesn't make any sense. It's not the shelter's fault that a bunch of people can't afford housing. What they're trying to do is deal with a really difficult situation and provide care for people who desperately need it. That's what's going on. And so do we need that system? Yes. I would love for all of us to work those people out of a job. That would be a great thing. In the interim, we're gonna need it because we need it. What we haven't done in the United States is when people talk about all the millions and billions of dollars we're spending, it's largely in response to the crisis. What we haven't done is prioritize investments upstream to make sure that fewer people are entering that system. And so the tendency is always on the short term, which is we need more shelter beds, we need more of this, we need to lock people up. Okay, let's have that conversation, but what's the upstream conversation? That is not what we've done at scale. And that's why we're having this issue. And so when people say, well, Greg, you want us to build housing, that's gonna take five years, I'm gonna be out of office by then. I'll say, you're right, that's a hard political issue. And if you wait as long as Seattle did, now you're in a huge challenge. But if we don't think upstream, we are never gonna get out of this. There is not enough treatment and not enough jails to take care of this problem. It's just going to be continuing to go. And so while we continue to care for folks, we have to be saying, what are we going to do to create more housing that's more affordable for more people? I get accused of being both a shill for corporate interest and a socialist in the same talk. I believe it should be easier, cheaper, and faster for people to build housing. And those people many times will use private capital and make a return in the process. Greg's a shill for corporate interest. That's where most of our housing comes from. We would all be better off if they could build more cheaply and more quickly. Greg's a socialist. There are going to be people who can't afford that housing. That's just a statement of fact. If you can afford $700 a month and rent is $1,200 a month, that's a math problem. Suggesting we have to figure out how to fill that gap is not socialism. It's just called mathematics. So the point being is that we need everyone at the table, we need people building more housing, we need policy makers making it easier to build housing, and we need to figure out then how are we gonna support people who can only afford 700 bucks a month, or 200 bucks a month. So this is hard, this is hard. And if we don't go upstream, we will be chasing our tail in perpetuity. And building more housing is hard. You've changed zoning? Not easy. People get irritated. And that's true here, and it's true in every community in the United States. So my hope with this book is that we would hopefully take some attention off of Joe who's on Third Avenue in Seattle. Not because Joe doesn't deserve care and dignity, of course he does. It's too easy for us to walk by Joe and say, I feel bad for Joe, but he made some poor decisions. In that simple interaction, it then absolves Greg Colburn of some responsibility. He made some poor choices, I'm gonna go teach my class, and da da da, and feel important. If instead I see Joe as a consequence of structure that I've contributed to, then when I look in the mirror at night when I'm brushing my teeth, I'll say, well then what am I gonna do? What are we going to do? And that's hard, that's scary, it's a lot easier just to blame Joe. And so structural changes are difficult, they take political will and resources and all that kind of stuff, and that's why we aren't doing it, because it's hard. But just continuing to blame Joe and worrying about this crisis response is a recipe to an ongoing crisis. I guarantee it. My first job was in New York City in 1995. Mayor Giuliani was mayor. You may have heard of this guy. He was cleaning up New York. I would ride the subway from the Upper West Side down to Wall Street. Inevitably, there would be someone sleeping on the subway who was probably experiencing homelessness. And what would happen? Doors would open. Cops would come in, rip this person out of a dead sleep, and drag him out. It's hard to watch. Manhattan was cleaner. There were fewer people on the subways, and there were fewer people as you walked around. And that was a success. Did that end homelessness? No. Today, New York City has the highest homeless population in the United States. It just moved it. It's not going away. You can put everyone in jail. At some point, they're going to get out, and they're not going to be in a better place than they were when you put them in. I understand the short-term temptation. I understand the challenges of local elected leadership. It's brutal. It's brutal. But if we just continue to go kind of short-term, short-term, short-term, we're not going to get out of this, unfortunately. And what also gives me hope is that this is not hopeless.

We know it works.

Now, we do need to make different decisions. But my hope is that your community and your state and other states around the nation start to think a little bit more structurally about this such that we're not thinking in 10 years, boy, 2026 was pretty good. Because that's my fear is that this could get much, much worse over the next decade. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it.

So now we are gonna open it up to questions. And then we've also invited some other panelists to join us. So with us tonight, we have Riley Massey joining us via Zoom. So she is a senior economic equity attorney at New Mexico Law and Poverty, where she advocates for equitable housing policy and works to advance housing justice for New Mexicans. We also have some subject matter experts in the audience. So we have Diana Mariscal, she's the Director of Behavioral Health Services with La Clinica de Familia. And then we have Nicole Martinez, the Executive Director of the Mesilla Valley Community Hope. And then I also see some other subject matter experts in the room. So I'm gonna ask my staff to grab a mic and who wants to ask the first question?

Hi, my name is Zach. And I have a question that starts with a little bit of like an observation. In your musical chairs analogy, I think you mentioned like the reason that he lost was there was only nine chairs and ten people. And I think what was a little bit missed was at the beginning of the game there were ten chairs. It's just one was removed. And I noticed too throughout the presentation there wasn't too much stated about like how homes are being like bought up and then utilized for creating like false markets as well as like the Airbnb market. And I was wondering if you have any insight on how that plays into homelessness as well. Thank you.

Yeah, good question. So I get a lot of questions about corporate ownership and Airbnb. And my answer to the question is that depending on the market, it can have a greater or lesser impact. So people in Seattle like to say, well, it's corporate ownership and Airbnb. And I'm like, no, no, no, you're not getting out of this that easy. We could ban those things and we'd have a huge housing crisis in Seattle. There are other places where this has become a huge issue, especially in hospitality-driven locations. Bend, Oregon, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Asheville, North Carolina, right? It's gobbling up housing units that are being taken out of circulation. So it's a very big issue. And that's why Airbnb is becoming a big topic of kind of the political discourse in those locations. A separate topic is the purchase of homes by corporate actors. And that is a really interesting one, because we saw a lot of activity post Great Recession. It tended to be located in the Sun Belt. Think Charlotte, Vegas, Phoenix, huge purchases, less so in the coastal cities, because it was more expensive and there weren't as many foreclosures. And so there's a lot of literature on this. And what I usually tell people is, 20 years ago, we were complaining about slumlords, people who didn't take care of their housing. And so to me, who owns it is less of a concern. I'm more interested in their conduct. So if it's a small time landlord who's not taking care of a unit and taking advantage of tenants, I'm concerned about that. If it's a large corporate owner who is colluding with other corporate owners to keep rents high, I'm concerned about that. And that becomes basically an antitrust case that Justice Department would have to deal with. And in fact, there is a real page lawsuit right now, which started in the Biden Justice Department, looking at this very issue where there was collusion between large owners and they were using a software system to price rents. scalping the renters. That's a problematic thing. So again, to me, it comes down to the conduct that we need to focus on. And so in some cases, it might be corporate actors who are behaving poorly, and in other cases, it might be small mom and pops who are doing so. And I think part of the problem is that 95% of housing in the United States doesn't have any federal support at all. So we would say that we have a highly commodified housing market, and that's commodified whether Blackstone owns it or whether I do, and I'm just saying, like, well, I can now charge $1,800 in Las Cruces, whereas it was $1,000 five years ago. That's commodification, and a small person can do that, and Blackstone can do it. The concern is that Blackstone might be more efficient in doing that, which is why it's getting a lot, you know, if Greg does it, whatever, if Blackstone does it. Frankly, the other thing that's really problematic on the corporate ownership is the crowding out effect. And it particularly is relevant for people who are trying to buy homes for the first time. And if all the affordable first-time home opportunities are being gobbled up by people who can pay cash and they just go and say, I'll buy 1,000 $250,000 homes in Las Cruces, that option doesn't exist. And so there are a range of activities that can be problematic that I think are starting to bubble to the surface, because I get this question a lot. People are concerned about that, and I think it's a fair point. The connection between that and homelessness, it's a couple steps removed. But if systematically rents are going up because of that, then yeah, there would absolutely be a consequence as it relates to homelessness. But frankly, probably more concerning is just people are getting gouged every month. But I will also say, when you don't have sufficient supply, that is a recipe for price increases. The best way to deal with predatory landlords is have enough housing such that the market won't allow them to keep going up. If you have 2% vacancies, those numbers are going up, whether it's Blackstone or Joe Blow, because the numbers allow you to do. If you have 10 people in Seattle looking to rent your unit, prices are going up. Good question.

Hi there, I love that book. I read it when it came out.

So I was very excited you were here.

And I'm not sure you actually will have the answers to this thing, but you sort of talked about the local context of homelessness in our city. And I'm wondering if there's information below that layer that explains like the drop in housing supply here, or like the vacancy rate, maybe either in New Mexico or Las Cruces, and then, oh June, I had another question. So that's what, oh yeah, and then I know that our excellent city councilors have really been working on trying to make more flexible zoning for housing, and I don't know if we can see any of those results even at this early stage.

Yep. Okay, so the first question, which is very interesting, because I have a research project going right now because of your question, which is, why are vacancy rates falling in Las Cruces? So the first time that I really saw this and scratched my head was in Albuquerque. I was doing some work there, and I ran their numbers, and their vacancy rate went from nine to four, and they had zero population growth in a decade. I was like... This doesn't make sense. What is going on here? Part of it might be some units are being pulled out by Airbnb, but it's not enough to make that move. That's such a massive move. I pulled up the census data and what I found out is that there are way more people who are living alone, renters who are living alone. For each person, you need more housing. The rate of solo rentership went up like this in Albuquerque. Without population growth, you had more households. If you get married or partner up, then two people are in a household. If we decide not to get married or not partner and we're each independent, we now have two households. So we have a secular trend of people partnering later in life. Generally speaking, partnering is just lower overall. People, especially during COVID, wanted to live alone. And so it's a real, real problem. And so we're actually writing a paper on this right now. Seattle and Minneapolis, my hometown of Minneapolis and now where I live, have the two highest rates of single-person rentership in the United States. And so it creates an interesting question of what kind of housing should we build? And part of it is we built a bunch of studios, and so what we're trying to figure out is are people living alone because they can, because we had that housing stock, or are developers responding to needs and cultural trends and saying, this is the kind of housing people want, so therefore we'll build the studios. Seattle's freaking out because we don't have families who are renting anymore. They've all left because we don't have family size units. And so the Seattle public school enrollment is doing this and no one wants that. That's not good for the city. And so what I said to city hall was like, unless you start building two and three bedroom rental units, you aren't gonna have kids in the Seattle public school system, except for people who are living in $2 million homes. which is what basically a home costs in Seattle right now. So it's a really interesting conundrum. And I think that that's, I haven't looked at Las Cruces specifically, but I think that's certainly part of the story. Your second question was, oh, zoning changes. Yeah. I am all for zoning changes. We write about it a lot in the book. I think it's absolutely essential. It's not a light switch. When you flip it, it doesn't all of a sudden mean we're gonna have an extra 100,000 housing units, right? It does take some time. And my hometown of Minneapolis did this, and what we saw is it took a little time. But we are starting to see action. I heard from a couple of folks earlier today, we're starting to see some more ADUs here because of that. So it's not gonna be an immediate response. The fact that you haven't had an immediate change in your housing stock doesn't mean that it failed. It just means that it takes some time for people to respond. It's also a really hard time to develop right now. Interest rates are up. And so the fact that we're not seeing new development isn't necessarily because zoning isn't amenable. It's just the math doesn't work for a lot of people right now. And that's true in Las Cruces as well as other places. So my point would be it's essential. Hurrah to those of you who pass this. And we just have to be patient and kind of see those effects play out over time.

a little bit on what we're seeing with apartments and what that's looked like in the homeless context. I can say that during the COVID crisis that we had a lot of apartment complexes that were mom and pop operated here. I'd worked with them for years and years. Started working at Community of Hope in 2006 and was housing people, hundreds of units throughout the city. And those units got bought out from one day to the next. The landlord property manager called us and said, I don't have a job tomorrow. Phoenix now has my job. And they bought up all of those units. And they worked really closely with us. They knew all of the caseworkers by name. They knew our clients by name. They would call if there was an issue happening. And so it was really easy for us to respond. So they bought all of those units. We had a lot of leases that ended up getting terminated. A lot of people then flushed to the streets who were in our housing program. So again, chairs being taken away that were not re-given. couldn't get pushed back in or rebuilt. And so we, as caseworkers, losing hundreds of units for the number of people that we were serving has been really impactful negatively in our community. And so that's part of why we have taken it a step further to try to rebuild some of the housing to make up for that loss that our community has seen.

Hi, first of all, thank you so much for being here. It was an amazing talk. Just one more detail to add to the local housing context. My husband and I bought our home fortuitously in 2006, so right before the bubble burst, but It was probably intended to be a starter home, but now, not to sound morbid, it's gonna be our ender home also, because I think there's a tongue-in-cheek joke that we could no longer afford the houses that we bought. several years ago and I think that is likely an issue in Las Cruces. A lot of quote unquote starter homes become people's forever homes and that is another unit off the market for that young family and I wonder if that's something that we can be considering also when we're looking at the crunch here and probably more widely.

Yeah, the shortage of housing has lots of consequences. One of them is people just being stuck, right? And I'm saying stuck, you're fine, right? We're not worrying about you. But the point is, is like you might like a different option and to create that, but when the housing chain doesn't work when we don't have supply at kind of each moment. When we moved to Seattle, we heard all sorts of people with young families saying, we would love to move to a place that's 2,500 square feet, but we're living in 1,200 square feet because there's nowhere for us to go. And they're just bumping into each other all the time. Mom and dad were both physicians. They had plenty of money. There was just nowhere for them to go. And so we're empty nesters. We're going through the same thing, which is we'd love to find a smaller home to move to. There just isn't. It's just not an option. So we're like, well, we might be here for a long time. And so I do think that the shortage of housing has tons and tons of consequences and kind of being clear about what those needs are because getting people to move up and out and allow people to enter home ownership is a huge part of the American dream, whether you would like that idea or not. So one of the questions I ask my students, I teach both undergrads and grads, is how many of you would like to own a home at some point in your lifetime? And usually about 70% to 80% of hands go up. And then I'll say, how many of you think that you will own a home in your lifetime? And it's usually about 20% or 25%. That generation has written off home ownership, especially in a place like Seattle, because the average home is a million bucks. They're like... I mean, this isn't even, it's not even an option. And so, and that's not good. And I'm, you know, having more rental options. I'm all for renting. I think we should probably have more renting in the United States. But the fact that we have basically said to this generation, you're priced out is a problem, is a problem, which is why I'm working on a starter home project in Washington with some folks where we're trying to build housing that will be available for people who want to own a home that's cheaper. You know, and up there, a starter home would be like 500 grand. That would be cheap. just because everything is so darn expensive. But we just don't have any of that. So we have to be really intentional. I guess my answer to your comment, which is important, is being really intentional about what do we need to make sure that this kind of system is working properly. And in some cases, that might be starter homes for home ownership. In other cases, it might be two and three bedroom rentals for people who want to rent and who have kids. And kind of looking at your housing supply and saying, boy, we have a lot of this and a lot of this, but not a lot of those things. Well, let's be intentional about that. And as, you know, as the boomers age, we have to be really, really intentional about what are the housing needs of that population. And not all everyone can or wants to continue to reside in the home that they raise their kids in. And that's a problem. And in Seattle, what happens is they can't afford the property taxes, and then they're out, and then they can't afford the rents because Social Security isn't enough, and then you go from this fairly stable situation to all of a sudden showing up on Nicole's doorstep. That's bad.

So what should local elected officials do about this?

That's a very good question. It's very hard. A lot of these problems are at higher levels of government than this. You do not have hundreds of millions of dollars to put into housing. And so what we have to acknowledge is one is to a certain extent you're operating with one hand tied behind your back. And so it'd be very helpful if the federal government and the state stepped in and provided more resources. With those limited resources, then I think there is a playbook, which is this is the best that we can do with those resources and use the evidence-based practices, creating the short-term responses that we need, whether that is shelter, whether that's other temporary forms of housing, while really focusing on making sure that we have enough rental assistance and housing upstream such that fewer people are entering. I think those are things that are within the bounds of reasonableness for local elected leaders. And, you know, as much as possible, really communicating to the electorate about these issues and the relationship. And so what I say in Seattle is if you're against multifamily housing, you're for homelessness. People don't like that, but I firmly believe it. If you're showing up on Tuesday night saying, no, I don't want multifamily housing because I don't want my neighborhood to change, what you're doing is creating the conditions for more homelessness. And I think we have to be clear about that. I think we have to communicate that. And as elected leaders, it's hard. It's very hard, right? Because people are going to be coming after you. And so it's not easy. It's very hard. And what I would say is what you don't want to do is succumb to pressure of not acting such that in five years it's even worse. Because right now Seattle's in a situation where we're going to have a different mayor every four years. I guarantee it. Because homelessness isn't going to end and they're going to kick you out. Lefty, moderate, lefty, moderate. You're gone, you're gone, you're gone. That's the deal. And so it's a good question. It's a hard question. I would say follow the evidence and support the things that are working and really have a community conversation about what needs are and the consequences of this housing crisis. And if we had vouchers from the federal government to support people, that would make everyone's job a heck of a lot easier. But that's not what the city council can do. When I was in Ashland, Oregon, we were talking about zoning changes, and the city council member said, well, you know, Greg, when I talk to developers, they usually don't talk about zonings and regulation. They talk about interest rates. And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So did the Ashland City Council vote to reduce interest rates? And then he kind of laughed. And I said, I'm joking, right? The Federal Reserve does that and the market does that. That's outside of your control. And so that, to a certain extent, is making your job more difficult now. It's not the mayor's fault that interest rates are where they are. But that's the hand you've been dealt. And so now you have to figure out, with these constraints, what's the best that we can do with those? Not a compelling political message. Better message is we can end homelessness in the next couple of years. Do I believe that? Probably not. Can we do better than we are? Absolutely. And we can continue to do the things that we know work. So anyone who's willing to serve in elected office right now, I take my hat off to you. It's hard work. It's hard work. And if we move away from stuff that we know works, it's just going to get harder for the next person to sit in that chair.

I just wanted to jump in a little bit in terms of local policy. One of the great things that Las Cruces has done recently is pass source of income discrimination prohibition. So that protects people with vouchers from being prohibited from renting in certain places. And I think another thing that the city could do is provide additional supportive services to people experiencing homelessness. If people are able to get the treatment and services that they need, then they can stay stably housed in the long term. I also just to briefly mention one of the biggest sources of affordable housing that's not subsidized by the government is manufactured homes. And one of the big policy pushes that we are making at the Center on Law and Poverty is to support opportunity to purchase for people who live in manufactured housing communities. So that gives these people living in affordable homes manufactured home communities the opportunity to purchase their parks when they go up for sale instead of having some out-of-state corporation come in and buy the park and raise the lot rent and make that unaffordable housing where largely elderly people live. And that can be done at the local level as well. So just to add that.

The one other thing I would add for local elected leaders is a lot of times we talk about the cost of housing interventions, and they are expensive. Housing is expensive. But you know what else is really expensive? Doing nothing. So untreated homelessness is terribly expensive. What's complicated about that, as many times as those costs are distributed through different system and different line items in the city budget, whether it's libraries, street and sanitation, first responders, et cetera. So one of my good friends in Seattle is a firefighter. He's like nine out of 10 calls that I get are homelessness related. It's a huge cost for the fire department in Seattle. Like if we were actually housing folks, they would free up so much time. He's like, I don't even fight fires anymore. And so, you know, emergency room visits, terribly expensive. That ends up being people's primary source of healthcare unless they're able to get healthcare at your facility. Hugely expensive. And so when we think about we are going to spend these dollars to create supportive housing for folks, what we're also getting is we're getting a release on the cost in all these other systems. And so if we only talk about this cost and ignore that, we're not kind of really speaking to the cost-benefit analysis that we need to. whether it pays for itself or not we can have that debate the point being that there's a huge savings associated with that we need to incorporate that when we talk about that and so if this keeps going and those numbers keep getting bigger and bigger what you're going to start to see is huge pressure on the city budget because of all these other huge costs that are associated with this and that's not what i want for your city or my city or any city

Thank you. This has been such a wonderful talk and a wonderful discussion. I've read articles in our local letters to the editor in our local paper saying something along the lines of, if we would just build a few thousand tiny homes each year, we would have the housing problem solved. Do you have any sense as to what role tiny homes can play? Or is that something that's not even useful to consider at this point?

Yeah, good question. The first point I would make is we need to be clear about what we mean by tiny home because there are a lot of different housing structures that can fit under that somewhat broad umbrella. And so I think that's the first thing is let's just be clear about what we're talking about. It could be literally a shed where we put a sleeping bag in it. We could call that a tiny home to a place that has a bathroom, right? Or it's a nice... insulated thing where you have shared bathroom facilities all of that could be included in that and so my answer your question to a certain extent might depend on what which type of tiny home that is the city of seattle as an entity has been enamored with tiny homes and so i get this question all the time and the the answer that i give is could tiny homes be part of the crisis response system the short-term temporary response system sure But we're fooling ourselves if we think that that is the long-term solution to this. In Seattle, every parcel is scarce. And so when people say, hey, there's an empty parcel here. Let's put 25 tiny homes on there. I'll say, that's fine. What are we going to do in three years? Because the folks are still going to be there. It's not like the need is going away. And what could we have done in three years in terms of building housing and going up and creating more capacity? And so to me, that's kind of the big argument there. And so if our long-term solution is tiny sheds, four walls and a cot, probably wouldn't be my first choice. And so when we start to think about what is the crisis response in terms of shelter, congregate, non-congregate, tiny homes, tent encampments, whatever the case may be, we have to have a collective conversation about that. And so what I said to folks in Seattle is, I'm not opposed to the conversation, I'm not opposed to considering that, but we need to think about what does this look like in five or 10 years? And that to me is not a sustainable solution in the long run. It might be something that could be worth discussing in the short run. If there was a silver bullet, we would do it. There's not a silver bullet. I think people kind of hear about this thing like, aha, tiny homes, great, let's grab onto that, because that's going to fix all our problems. The point is, no, it might be part of the solution, but we need to think holistically on this. It's so tempting to just say, what's the shiny new toy? Let's focus on that, and that's going to fix our problems. And I don't think there's a shiny new toy. The shiny toy is housing plus services, scaled and consistently delivered over time. I don't know how shiny it is, but that's the best shot we got.

Hi, my name is Rosa Morales, and I would like to mention a couple of things. I'm a homeowner in El Paso, Texas. I bought my first house in 1980, brand new, and I have been reluctant to sell it, regardless that a lot of my neighbors have sold them, and also regardless that the rental company that managed my house continuously asked me to increase the rent, since my background is in social work. I'm very familiar with some of these issues, okay? Well, when I retired, I decided to move to Las Cruces, and for the past five years, I have been checking on the type of house that I would like to buy. I want a two-bedroom, two-bed. And I have found that there's only one construction company in Las Cruces that actually builds two bedroom, two beds. Everybody else is a three bedroom, two bed. My real estate person has been actually working with me all this time and I have learned a lot. uh... my background is in social work administration and planning so uh... i remember when i went to ucla to do my masters and i was offered an internship with a stipend from united weight and the individual the director talked to me and says do you wanna uh... work on research for the homeless. And I remember in 1987 telling him, no, thank you, because I'm interested in working with Hispanics. And for Hispanics, homelessness in Los Angeles is not an issue. And I have the statistics to prove that. We do have problems with deep pregnancy, with poverty, with salary being low, but not homelessness. I want you to check your statistics, because I was looking at them, and I noticed that cities such as San Antonio, and I lived there for five years, and Los Angeles I lived there for, and Tucson I have lived there, I noticed that several of the several of the cities that are predominantly Hispanic don't have as much of a problem as some of the other ones. So I wonder if family values and support systems has something to do with it. That's just it. The other thing that I want to tell you, I have the privilege of working with a politician in Los Angeles, a council member for six years, and two years in El Paso with another city council member. When you said the politicians cannot do much, I'm telling you that's wrong. They can do a lot. Because those politicians that I work with, especially the one in Los Angeles that have like 25 people on staff, and the one in El Paso had only two staff members. I remember that they precisely read and are acquainted with the statistics, and they have meetings with individuals saying, this is what my community needs. You need to start looking and developing that, talking to the banks, talking to all those services that are needed. So they need to be educated and they need to also be able to understand their power of going to those associations, real estate association, construction associations, and let them know what is expected. The other thing is develop policies. develop policies that require for anybody that's receiving housing grants to have housing, not only for seniors and everything, but I'm talking four-bedroom, three-bedroom, two-bedroom, and one-bedroom. Especially now that the senior population is extending, actually, that's something that needs to be considered. And I'm not talking about having senior housing in one place where all the seniors will live. As a social worker, I don't believe on that. I believe seniors can be living among two parents and everything, and there's the type of support system that is needed. Well, my experience in Texas with housing is quite interesting because I live right here. I live in Las Cruces and I rent here. I own in El Paso. And as somebody that is very familiar with how politics works and everything, I'm familiar with what happened with these two states and two cities and how people respond. A lot of people live precisely in Texas, but they come to work here. Why? Because the salary is higher. A lot of people in Texas are very interested in buying homes actually in New Mexico because the property taxes are ridiculous in Texas. So I'm familiar with those kind of dynamics, but I do believe I do believe that politicians have the power to really create those type of avenues and solutions for the future. Everybody says, well, they cannot do much. They can do much. Believe me. but they have to be able to use that power. I remember coming with a group lobbying for $6 million for the bond, right? And after their discussions and everything, they, at the end, in a couple of meetings, they told us, we're gonna give you $5 million. Right at that time, I told my colleagues, we were not asking for five, we need six. Most of them said, Rosa, you should be happy with five. You know, come on, five is closest to six. Well, let me tell you, no, we requested six and there's a minimum. So the following day we had a meeting with some of the city staff and some of them are here and I told them right there, guess what? We are not happy with the $5 million. We need $6 million. And I'm showing you here that I'm developing flyers with everybody's phone numbers, the council members, and tomorrow morning I'm gonna be passing them out at the farmer's market. And I'm gonna be asking everybody to call each and every one of the politicians and let them know, not five, six million dollars. Guess what, the following meeting we got six million dollars. But I remember people saying, come on Rosa, Finance is good enough. No, it wasn't good enough, and we got the same million dollars. So start kind of not giving the opportunity to individuals that were elected to be in those positions to lobby for their constituents. We voted for them. They need to exercise that power. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. We're about to wrap up and close our session. I wanted to thank all of you again for coming. Thank you, gracias, danke, danke, and grazie. Last words for our panelists, and then we'll close it up.

I'll go ahead. I gotta thank Greg for visiting us, for talking about a lot of the things that we've been saying for a long time. I don't think the ideas and the services that have come from Community of Hope are radical or wild. They've been sound. We need help from the community. We're gonna keep doing the work that we are doing. I would say from our local elected officials that we need to partner with you. We need each other. We can't do the work without you. But we also are firm in our proposals that we do give, the funding, the things that we think will make an impact in our community, things like homeless prevention. So even though we're housing more people than we have ever housed before, we're seeing higher numbers of people who are first time homeless than we have ever seen. So we really need support in homeless prevention. We need rapid rehousing, rental assistance vouchers. We need more housing to build more housing. The city has been really aggressive in that and we're very grateful for that. We're also facing HUD cuts from the new administration and notice of funding opportunities that are going forward. and that could really impact people that we have that are currently stably housed. So like you saw that picture of the iceberg, there are so many people that we work with that are only housed because of the assistance and the treatment and all of the help and services from our community members, people that I see here in our audience today. and to support these ideas that we know work and that have been working, but that we just can't keep up with the number of people who are entering homelessness and help us with our expanded outreach as well. Those are the things that we keep saying over and over. We won't stop saying that, that permanent supportive housing, any kind of supportive housing can really help in these situations. And we're here, we're committed to do it. And again, hoping that our community supports those efforts and our elected officials as well.

And you go ahead. Go ahead. Any final comments? Riley? Riley, are you there? There you are.

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize you were waiting for me. I will just second what Nicole said. I think it's so, so important for local governments to support the services that we do have for people experiencing homelessness. And Nicole is really the expert, so you should listen to her and Greg as well.

Well, I would just thank you all for being here. I want to thank everyone here who's doing the good work on the ground every day. It's life-changing. It's life-saving in many cases. And I want to thank those of you who are elected leaders, kind of fighting this fight every day. And you're right. They do have a lot of power. And I think we need to be hold our elected leaders to account and also recognize kind of what stuff is within their purview and ability to change and what things aren't. And that's sometimes hard to differentiate and understand. So I really appreciate it. I think the inflow point is absolutely essential. And this is true in Los Angeles. I was sitting next to the woman who runs the LASA, which is the homeless response system in LA. You wanna talk about a hard job. She said, you know, over the last couple years we've gotten, and I forget what the number was, tons of people housed. and homelessness went up. Why? Because of all these people were entering the system. And so the entry problem is the huge, huge issue. And so even if we keep doing this important work, if that inflow doesn't slow, we'll have to keep investing more and more and more. And if we need to, we should, but ideally we would move upstream and make sure that those numbers are slower such that this job doesn't become so immense. That's the issue in big cities is that has become so massive that there's almost not enough dollars and resources to deal with that crisis. And so we need to do this, we need to fund this, support this, that could work while also focusing upstream and saying, how are we gonna create more housing for more folks? That's the path. It's not easy, but that's the path. And thanks for all of you who are working on that.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks to our panelists. Thanks to the staff who put this together. Please go home safely. We'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.