You are walking down the street, and you see someone who appears to be homeless.
Most of us feel sympathetic, and might reflect on how our career, education, family, mental or physical health have resulted in a roof over our heads. It’s common to ascribe homelessness to mental health, unmitigated drug/alcohol misuse, family catastrophes, or generally unfortunate circumstances.
Greg Colburn’s book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, examines the data around homelessness and finds that the common denominator of homelessness is, quite simply, housing supply.
Colburn looked all over North America, conducting statistical comparisons to get to the root causes of rising homelessness rates. West Virginia, with some of the highest rates of drug addiction in the US, has some of the lowest rates of homelessness. Comparing warmer cities with colder climates could not explain the data either. When looking at poverty he still found no direct correlation, even in a city like Detroit with some of the highest rates of poverty in the United States.
What he found instead is that homelessness is due to a lack of suitable, attainable housing.
Colburn’s approach illuminates the problem in a straightforward fashion – increasing the housing (particularly rental) supply is the key to alleviating homelessness on a systemic level.
Since 2019, Edmonton has seen the highest increases of rent in the country. This has significantly decreased housing vacancies, and the estimated homeless population in Edmonton has effectively doubled. In places like Toronto or Vancouver the price and supply of housing has skyrocketed in direct correlation with the growth of homelessness.
What pushes people into housing insecurity is not the accumulation of their life experiences, it is that they do not have the ability to financially mitigate negative outcomes. People lose jobs, struggle with their health, or suffer through the death or separation from those they rely on. It is not these factors alone, but the increasing lack of attainable housing options that force our most vulnerable into the streets.
Initiatives like the Housing Accelerator Fund that backstop Edmonton’s affordable housing strategy hold immense potential to alleviate homelessness if deployed effectively. Prioritizing the expansion of affordable housing initiatives, policymakers can simultaneously mitigate the root causes of homelessness and foster a more equitable society for all Canadians.
