Don’t Let a Book by Experts Silence Your Common Sense: “Homelessness is [Not] a Housing Problem”

A book written and applauded by experts can tempt you to doubt your common sense and quietly surrender intellectual ground at a crucial moment, especially if it makes a bold claim and you haven’t read it yet.

Consider Homelessness is a Housing Problem by authors Gregg Colburn (an assistant professor at the University of Washington) and Clayton Page Aldern (a Seattle-based data scientist and policy analyst). The book’s attractive cover claims the authors have used “accessible statistical analysis” to “test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the variation observed across the country.”

(A careful observer might notice the little bait-and-switch right there on the cover and save themselves hours of reading, but I didn’t.)

Inside the book, one by one, the authors reduce observable and intuitive facts about human nature and market forces to so many scatterplot variables and feed them into a special linear regression algorithm. Their analysis shows — by an irrefutably sharp line climbing through the middle of a cloud of dots — that only one factor can convincingly explain “regional variation” between cities’ homeless populations: Namely, the cost and availability of affordable rental housing.

Thus, “homelessness is a housing problem.”

Colburn and Aldern “conclude by presenting a broad proposal to end homelessness in the United States. Ultimately, in the long run, the prescription is simple: Policymakers must increase the number of affordable housing units and provide subsidies and rental assistance to households to ensure they can access housing.”

Now, given the vicious public scuffle taking place these days over whether or not government-subsidized housing (lots of it! more!) is the primary solution to the distressing and growing problem of homelessness, a book like this one can become a formidable weapon in the hands of public housing advocates. They can (and do) wave it around while assigning adjectives like “data-driven,” “evidence-based,” and “proven” to their favored policy prescription.

Meanwhile, those who question the myopic convenience of the book’s conclusion may (foolishly) allow themselves to be sidelined by what amounts to a toilsome public challenge: Our 268-page book proves — using a statistical method we’ve explained but you won’t understand — that housing is the answer to homelessness! Prove us wrong.

It’s troubling if you take the bait, which I did. Colburn and Aldern’s book sat on my desk for about three months as I scrambled up a steep learning curve into the world of homeless policy. Theirs was a few books down in a tall stack, and the bright bars boasting that 91% of Amazon customers gave the book 4 or 5 (mostly 5) stars whispered that maybe, just maybe, someone really had managed to make a statistical case showing that the complex human issue of homelessness could be solved by socialized housing.

I read the book cover-to-endnotes and I’ve concluded that a much sillier book actually sheds more and better light on the modern debate over how to best solve — or not solve — the crisis of homelessness.

In the 1979 cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a human-like alien race designs a super (duper) computer named Deep Thought, and asks it to answer the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” As the computer whirrs to life to calculate the answer, members of the Philosopher’s Union storm into the room demanding the machine be shut down before it puts them out of work. Deep Thought appeases them by saying it will take seven-and-a-half-million years to calculate the answer, which guarantees that thousands of generations of philosophers will make their fortunes speculating about what it might be.

Finally, after seven-and-a-half-million years, Deep Thought reveals the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything: “42.”

The tensely impatient spectators are outraged and incredulous, but “I checked it very thoroughly,” says Deep Thought, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

That comic script offers an apt parallel for the Colburn-Aldern book and similar intellectual exercises: First, when a dizzyingly-calculated answer to a complex social problem seems inadequate and out-of-touch with observable reality, it probably is, and you needn’t waste seven-and-a-half-million years retracing its algorithms.

Second, there is a modern equivalent to the Philosophers Union: An entire industry now exists to build, buy, and manage government-subsidized housing units for the “precariously housed” and homeless. No one should be surprised that substantial fortunes are made by it, and that fact alone should provoke close scrutiny.

Third, and last, Colburn and Aldern brazenly reject asking the right questions about homelessness. Instead, they admit, “central to this book is a concerted effort to focus our attention on differences between cities rather than those between individual people.”

Never mind the fact that only individual human beings — creatures with a stunning array of personal agency, circumstance, and motivation — are capable of entering, experiencing, and exiting homelessness. Never mind that the first and most desperate need for many (likely most) experiencing unsheltered homelessness is not a permanent subsidized housing unit, but warm and safe shelter coupled with relentless intervention, targeted clinical services, and compassionate accountability. (Google the recent news stories about former Nickelodeon star Tylor Chase for one real-time proof-of-theory.)

Noting all this, one book reviewer (Christopher J. Calton of the Independent Institute) said, “Colburn and Aldern’s emphasis on regional variations alone seems, at times, to be designed to produce a misleadingly monocausal explanation.”

It’s hard to disagree with that assessment, especially because Colburn and Aldern make a jarring series of genuinely insightful observations (about the individual causes and risk factors for homelessness and the politically malleable forces that impact housing supply, demand, and costs) followed by repeated and nonchalant dismissals of their relevance.

In the end, whether or not Colburn and Aldern’s answer is right doesn’t actually matter; they asked the wrong question.

So, I encourage you: Don’t let the existence of a book by experts hoodwink you into rejecting common sense. Don’t accept the claims that statistical analysis has somehow proven that “homelessness is a housing problem.” Observable reality proves otherwise. There are much better questions and answers to the human problem of homelessness. And socialism, even in miniature, has never once worked.