In this series
In this series
The columns I wrote earlier this month about adverse childhood experiences, alcoholism, and addiction as drivers of homelessness are all beside the point, some advocates say.
The New York Times in 2022 called homelessness a simple game of “musical chairs: Imagine there are 10 people for nine chairs. One person, weighed down by poor health, does not make it to a chair. Is the problem that person’s health or the lack of chairs?”
Homelessness, though, is not simple. It’s thousands of games of musical chairs with new tunes on a jukebox every five minutes as participants run, walk, or weave. Some refuse to sit in chairs. Some of the chairs are couches. Homelessness, in short, is not simply supply and demand: It’s a magical mystery tour of sociology and psychology.
Let’s start with the view from 40,000 feet: America has 134 million households and 146 million housing units, which means that at any one point, we have 12 million year-round vacant housing units.
The national average of rental vacancy rates in March 2026 for the 75 largest metropolitan areas was 7.2%. That’s changed little during the past decade (the figure in 2015 was 6.8%), but that high-level view flattens the landscape, which has both peaks and pits—and not always in the places many would suspect.
For example, Washington State had a low vacancy rate in 2024 and was the worst state in the US for chronic homelessness. Causation, though, is not so simple. One mayor in the state led a study showing Washington is also the worst state in its per capita rate of fentanyl and opioid overdoses seen in emergency rooms. It’s also had the fourth highest rate of adult mental illness.
The study concluded: “Behavioral-health risks, in combination with economics, show greater explanatory power for the state’s outlier homelessness trends than housing-market dynamics alone.”
If homelessness is a cancer on American society, we may need something analogous to the Knudson “two-hit” theory of cancer causation: Some tumors develop when individuals with a “susceptibility gene” also develop mutations in otherwise normal genes.
Ground-level looks illuminate the limits of grand generalizations and promotions. Blogs in Syracuse, New York, crow that houses are “so cheap,” and the metropolitan area has the highest vacancy rate in the country, 17%. Nevertheless, a local newspaper described a “staggering” growth of homeless families due to a lack of multi-bedroom housing plus a decrepit housing stock.
One big-picture look from the National Low Income Housing Coalition provides data on how 11 million extremely low-income (ELI) renter households face a shortfall of 7 million homes. A prime-age ELI is a person aged 25 to 64 whose income is less than 30% of the median and who lives in a household where no one earns more than 80% of the median income.
The American Enterprise Institute, though, points out that most ELIs live in homes that they, family members, or friends own, and they afford do so by earning some money and living with another earner. Four of five married ELIs are in non-ELI households, with combined earnings pushing them above the threshold. The moral of the story: “Families are a key mechanism for avoiding poverty and providing support to low-income people.”
Families these days often need two earners, but the US has 10 million single parents now (roughly three-quarters mothers only and one-quarter fathers only) compared to 1.5 million in 1950. They overwhelmingly manage to stay housed, but many live on the edge. Unmarried mothers and children are generally in shelters, but some of the fathers of those children are on the streets.
Homelessness is also complex because the number of households seeking housing relates to social changes of the past half-century. About 39 million (29%) Americans now live in one-person households, up from 19% in 1974. About 6 million are widows or widowers, but a smaller share of older adults live alone now than in 1990. Some 33 million are alone by choice or divorce.
Some celebrate “Singles Awareness Day” on Feb 15. For many who are divorced, it’s a sad occasion. For all, it makes a difference in housing availability. The radical increase in divorce has increased the number of people living on the edge and decreased the supply of available housing. In 1950, twice as many American adults were married than unmarried. Now the numbers are close to even, and the percentage of unmarried who are divorced is nearly three times higher.
University of Chicago economists in 2024 published the largest study of homelessness ever done. Of the 139,000 homeless adults included in the study—which economists claim has the “most representative samples ever used,” based on 2010 US census figures—about two-thirds lived in homeless shelters and the rest were sleeping rough. Most had worked sporadically in the past year and earned a few thousand dollars.
Here’s what surprised the authors: “At least one-quarter of those experiencing homelessness had higher incomes than most single housed poor adults. … Those experiencing homelessness, particularly sheltered homelessness, look very much like single housed poor adults who share their demographic profile in terms of their incomes, employment, and safety net participation.”
The researchers lacked a good explanation: “Substantial overlap in the economic circumstances of sheltered homeless and housed poor individuals raises the question of what factors, unobserved in our data, cause some individuals to become homeless while others remain housed.”
They acknowledged that “homelessness remains a rare event even among those who are very poor. Differences in permanent incomes and connections to formal work and the safety net do not appear to be the predominant factors.”
The study concluded in speculation: “Alternative explanations may center on the role of behavioral health conditions and substance abuse disorders, the strength of social ties. … Extreme poverty appears to be just one part of the broader puzzle of what put someone at risk of homelessness.”
