Why housing shortages cause homelessness, The Works in Progress Newsletter, Salim Furth, January 29, 2025

This is one of those points that housing economists pretty much agree on, but which is often viewed outside of the housing world as a bleeding-heart left-wing fiction. But the way the conclusion is reached is very logical and data-based. It’s not ideological or anticapitalist or whatever.

Furth offers this story about a girl from a large family, in too small a home:

Being a homeless mom put her on the fast track for a housing voucher. She received one and found an apartment several months later. Since then, she’s moved on to a better apartment within walking distance of her retail job and her son’s preschool.

Diona charted an odyssey through her social and legal world that’s impressive for a teenager. But imagine for a moment a much simpler story: Diona stayed with her mother. That story is short and boring. It’s common and unappreciated. And if Diona’s family had happened to live in a cheaper part of the country and rented a bigger house, it might have been her story.

It takes some thinking to argue and understand how this works. A little setup:

The American cities with the highest housing prices have the worst homelessness problems. YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) advocates highlight this correlation to argue for policies that increase housing supply. But, when you think about it a bit, it’s not clear exactly how high rent contributes to homelessness. It’s not like $800 per month apartments are any more affordable to most homeless people than $1,000 per month apartments. And homelessness is frequently associated with mental health or drug abuse problems. This is why non-YIMBY progressives insist that only more generous vouchers or subsidies can help and non-YIMBY conservatives argue that only behavioral change can help by tackling alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental health problems.

And:

The stories and data in this essay show the missing link between homelessness and housing costs: people without money who avoid becoming homeless do so mostly by staying with others, usually their own parents. This happens outside the formal housing market. But parents’ and others’ ability to offer space is limited by what they can afford in the market. Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.

Read the whole thing for the in-depth version. This is an important piece to understand.

How NIMBYs Made ‘Back Yard’ Mean ‘Entire Neighborhood’, Bloomberg CityLab, Garrett Dash Nelson, February 6, 2019

And yet simply swapping the “N” for a “Y” runs the risk of depoliticizing substantive, conflictual questions about who gets to decide how cities transform. Instead, the part of the NIMBY acronym that deserves the most scrutiny is the part which represents geographic small-mindedness: the “BY.”

Interesting.

I’ve said before that the real challenge for urbanists and housing advocates is getting the general public to relearn what cities actually are, which involves the fact that nobody “owns” them.

How, exactly, do we define the geographical limits of the area that someone cares about? In other words, how do we know what part of a city makes up someone’s “back yard”? Even in the sentence I offered in the opening paragraph—“local opposition which rises up to protest neighborhood change”—I used a descriptive sleight-of-hand. What, after all, is local? What defines a neighborhood?

Yeah.

Some folks are more concerned with the actual nuts and bolts of getting stuff built. That’s important, of course, but I’m especially interested in these abstract, conceptual questions, because I think they inform a lot of why we don’t get things done, in ways a lot of us aren’t even aware of. (E.g., I often find myself reacting to urbanist insights with something like “Wow, so that’s why I think this way,” etc. I’m not kidding when I sometimes say learning about urbanism is almost like psychological self-examination.)

Read the whole thing!

Exploring beneath Gwanghwamun’s surface, The Korea Times, Ron Bandun, April 27, 2021

As a practicing anarchaeologist, I made several visits to Gwanghwamun to see the ruins for myself as soon as the news broke. Anarchaeology, if it isn’t apparent, is the clandestine visitation of archaeological sites, a branch of urban exploration alongside draining or roof-topping. I wasn’t the first to coin the term, but I put that definition to it given the need to name an interesting new hobby I was developing. Anarchaeologists don’t damage or loot sites ― we just want a closer look before redevelopment destroy them.

Okay, that’s cool. Although his discoveries were a little underwhelming:

Finding the stream was underwhelming to me for a few more reasons.

First, the ground in downtown Seoul is known to be crammed with historical relics of varying significance, sometimes referred to as the “Pompeii of Seoul,” so the discovery of a stream doesn’t add much to the big picture.

Secondly, the streambed seemed to be dry, probably excavated right out of the earth rather than an active part of Jongno District’s amazingly complex underground water infrastructure.

Third, the addition of Jungang Underpass in 1971 beneath Gwanghwamun, as well as the 2009 installation of the sizeable underground complex beneath the King Sejong statue, would have disrupted any continuity in the water body’s flow as parts of the stream would have been uncovered and discarded in those days.

This is also an important point:

Every time a shovel pierces the ground in Jongno, it hits something historic. If we preserved all these discoveries, there’d be no room left for the living among downtown Seoul’s increasing inventory of preserved ruins.

Maybe the United States has little enough “real” history that we don’t have to triage preservation like this. But in some places, there are so many layers and ruins and artifacts that you just kind of have to accept that not all of it is worth keeping.

I wonder if having “too much” history almost makes it easier to embrace change, rather than seeing the pieces of history and heritage you do have as scarce artifacts to zealously—maybe jealously—hold on to.

For the fourth item today is this delightful little post from Substack’s social media half:

It’s one of those old-school VHS-based board game things. I love stuff like this.

Related Reading:

New and Old #94

New and Old #95

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