Downtown is small as cities go.

There are no proper skyscrapers, but two respectably large bank buildings and a motley collection of adjacent 10- and 15-story structures might fit a definitionally loose description of a skyline. There’s a theater district, a miniature park and a landmark that’s at least regionally famous.

I lived here last 16 years ago. It’s changed, but not as much as delirious local real estate agents, still drunk from the tsunami of out-of-town money that flooded in during the pandemic housing boom, would have you believe. They’ll pitch you a downtown revival, but downtown was never dead or even dying. Uninteresting maybe, and rough around its eastern edge, but tales of an urban miracle both overstate the improvements and understate the initial conditions.

The city never suffered from a lack of investment. A sprawling university campus on the downtown area’s western perimeter boasts an impressive list of alumni donors including a billionaire patron family always willing to bless development initiatives. The patriarch, long dead, frequented a locally-owned Italian restaurant where I once kept a bar seat warm on many a cold night. He ordered spaghetti with marinara and drank cheap, by-the-glass house merlot. His predisposition for charity didn’t extend to the bartenders.

More than anything, downtown had a chicken-egg dilemma. It’s just far enough away from the campus to make walking a tall order for inebriated college kids, and with the suburbs growing rapidly, it made more sense to build strip malls and movie theaters around countless newly constructed, upper-middle-class enclaves than sink money into downtown.

Eventually, though, the college population expanded such that housing everybody on campus or directly adjacent to it became wholly infeasible. Office-to-residential conversions downtown, while not straightforward, were a natural, and ultimately necessary, solution.

Around the same time, city planners picked up on national fads and fashions, and before long, downtown had all the trendy trappings of larger urban areas. There’s expensive sushi, needlessly upscale whiskey bars, a Starbucks on every corner, a Ruth’s Chris and on and on. Valets now stand on the curb in front of both nice hotels. Old city, where I used to eat deep-fried mushrooms and shoot pool at dive bars, became a predictable row of gentrified microbreweries and coffee roasters. And every brick building with a claim on historical significance was renovated into million-dollar lofts.

It sounds transformational, but really it isn’t. The place wasn’t dilapidated before, and it’s not glitzy now. It’s just enlivened. There are things to do other than go to work and the theater. The difference isn’t “night and day,” but it is night and day. Before, there were only people downtown during the day. Now, they’re here at night too, and whenever the business crowd and suburbanites aren’t around, the university diaspora, three miles removed from the homeland, more than suffices to keep the lights on at restaurants, cafes and bars.

Every morning before dawn, I take a walk around. I live on the quiet, western edge of downtown, nestled among lawyers’ offices, boutiques and bookshops. There’s plenty of history here, and it’s evident. Statues of founders and pioneers you’ve never heard of guard municipal buildings and courthouses, and everything that’s old is reasonably well kept.

There’s an ornate, imposing Baptist church just up the street from my front door. Every day, the same half-dozen homeless sleep on the veranda. One man has a friend: A white Boxer mix. For the first couple of weeks, it barked when I passed under the street lamps. One day early last month, it poked its head up, looked and, without speaking, disappeared again into the collection of blankets and backpacks arrayed on the church steps. Nothing to see, apparently. Just the neighbor out for his morning walk.

According to a history published by the National Institutes of Health, the modern era of homelessness in America dates to the early 1980s. “Major forces that changed the complexion of homelessness in the modern era include gentrification of the inner city, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill [and] an inadequate supply of affordable housing options,” the 2018 study reads. “In some cities, property values increased dramatically in the areas near downtown [and] since the 1980s, rents in metro areas across the country have been increasing while wages have stagnated.” A recent article in The New Yorker, cited extensively below, attributes modern homelessness to “a withdrawal of the federal government’s commitment to providing either affordable housing or a functional safety net for its vulnerable citizens.”

The latest point-in-time (PIT) information provided to The Department of Housing and Urban Development showed there were nearly 583,000 people in America experiencing homelessness in January of 2022. That’s around 18 out of every 10,000 people in the country.

The figures are subject to considerable uncertainty. They’re based on information provided to HUD by Continuums of Care participants (or “CoCs”), which are required to produce an unduplicated count of homeless persons as part of an application process. The CoC program provides funding for state and local governments as well as nonprofits in an effort to alleviate homelessness. HUD conducts “a limited data quality review,” but cautions it hasn’t independently verified all the figures submitted by program participants.

Full data collection resumed in 2022 following a one-year hiatus in 2021, when the pandemic complicated the collection process. It’s reasonable to assume the incidence of homelessness last year would’ve increased more sharply were it not for the legacy of federal pandemic relief programs. As the National Alliance To End Homelessness put it, “given the unprecedented circumstances facing the nation,” the small uptick in overall homelessness (the “total” line in the figure above) might “be characterized as unexpectedly small.” “COVID-19-related government interventions benefitted many people,” the nonprofit said, adding that “eviction moratoria and the federal Emergency Rental Assistance program kept (and are still keeping) many people housed.”

There’s no shortage of national news coverage documenting America’s homelessness crisis and its causes. The natural question to ask when confronted with such coverage is whether there is, in fact, a crisis. Crisis and tragedy are cousins, and they very often overlap, but they aren’t strictly synonymous in a society-wide sense.

Every tragedy counts as a crisis for the person experiencing it. But tragedies don’t always constitute crises for nations. If a tree falls on your house and a family member is injured or dies, that’s a tragedy. For you, it’s also a crisis. Unfortunate as it is, it’s not a crisis for the country, though. Half a million homeless is tragic. In a country with the resources to address the situation, half a million homeless is tragically ridiculous, which is to say wholly inexcusable. But does it count as a crisis for a nation with 330 million people?

That’s a difficult question to answer. One way to approach it is to endeavor a cross-country comparison, but that’s complicated immeasurably by the lack of universal definitions and also by disparities in the frequency of data collection. As the OECD noted in 2021, “There is no internationally agreed definition of homelessness [and] different definitions of homelessness may co-exist within countries.”

Some definitions are narrow to the point of being farcically literal. In Japan, for example, homeless counts refer to Japanese “who live in city parks, riversides, roads, station buildings and other facilities without reason and use for them in daily life.” In Australia, by contrast, people without “suitable accommodation alternatives” are considered homeless if their current living arrangement “is in a dwelling that is inadequate; or has no tenure, or if their initial tenure is short and not extendable; or does not allow them to have control of, and access to space for social relations.” Accordingly, Japan has almost no homeless people (less than 4,000 in 2020) while Australia has among the highest incidences of homelessness across OECD members and candidate countries. Suffice to say benchmarking against other developed or developing nations won’t work.

When it comes to characterizing homelessness in America, it’s useful, I think, to view it in the context of other rolling national emergencies which virtually everyone agrees can at least loosely be described as crises, the most relevant being the shortage of affordable housing which, on a kind of Occam’s razor approach, is almost surely the most important factor in explaining homelessness.

The musical chairs analogy is a mainstay of this discussion. “Chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them,” as The Atlantic‘s Jerusalem Demsas put it, in a December 2022 article. “Examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability [but] when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless.”

In the context of America, richest country in the history of human civilization, epicenter of innovation and issuer of the world’s reserve currency, nearly every instance of chronic homelessness is a tragedy one way or another. Drug addiction and mental health problems, two prominent predictors of homelessness, are treatable, and even if you believe the US government is budget constrained (i.e., if you believe in the myth that says deficits matter for the US), the cost of implementing a durable subsidized housing regime with the potential to effectively end homelessness is, by some estimates, a relative pittance and anyway far cheaper than the status quo and a fraction of what the US spends on ostensible “priorities,” some of which are self-evidently less important than addressing domestic housing security.

If a lack of affordable housing is a crisis (and I think most people would agree that it is), and if that crisis is getting worse (and, again, I think most people would agree that it is), it’s fair to suggest that absent structural solutions to address the problem, the crisis that is a shortage of affordable housing could become indistinguishable from the human tragedy that is homelessness. That’s a circuitous way of suggesting that a nation with a worsening affordable housing crisis is a nation that either has, or will soon have, a homelessness crisis.

Economists, sociologists and scholars fill reams debating the best way to address the affordable housing shortage, but virtually all of the literature has one thing in common: The contention that effective solutions need help from policy. At a very basic level (and notwithstanding the pandemic experience, which was characterized by actual, physical constraints tied to acute supply chain disruptions), the impediment surely isn’t wherewithal. There are myriad challenges associated with (for example) expanding supply precisely where it’s needed and some of the logistical hurdles are doubtlessly quite high. But we do have the money, and we certainly know how to build houses and apartment buildings. We built the nation’s cities from the ground up, after all, we stormed Normandy and we landed a man on the moon.

The implication is that homelessness in America, like child hunger and like poverty in general, is in no small part a policy choice. A more generous description that doesn’t implicate elected officials in a witting disregard for half a million people is to call it a policy failure — a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. Either way, it’s the worst kind of tragedy. And it’s not the only example of tragic outcomes born of, and perpetuated by, policy choices and failures.

In 2018, Zillow commissioned a study from a team that included Penn’s Dennis Culhane, one of America’s foremost authorities on homelessness. The research identified two key rent thresholds beyond which the incidence of homelessness for a given community should be expected to increase.

As the figure shows, more people experience homelessness once the share of income spent on rent reaches 22%. Once that share hits 32%, community leaders can expect a “rapid” (as the study put it) increase in homelessness rates.

The 30% threshold, Zillow remarked, isn’t “just an adage” or some useful rule of thumb for mortgage loan officers. It’s an actual marker for predicting the onset of a homelessness spiral. “When the share of average income spent on rent in a community begins to meaningfully exceed that line, the risk of housing insecurity and/or homelessness rapidly increases,” a summary of Culhane’s academic paper warned.

Homelessness, as documented in the HUD data anyway, is concentrated in just a handful of states. Specifically, more than half of people experiencing homelessness are in California, New York, Florida, Washington and Texas, with California disproportionately (and famously) overrepresented.

Note also that just 25 CoCs (out of hundreds) account for nearly half of all homelessness in the country, and just two (covering Los Angeles and New York City) account for more than a fourth.

With those statistics in mind, it’s important to address one of the most pervasive (and in some ways pernicious) myths about homelessness in America: That the high incidence of homelessness in some locales, California in particular, is a result of good weather and social policies.

In theory, the homeless “enjoy” unchecked freedom of movement. In many cases, they’re unemployed, don’t have family obligations (or any other obligations for that matter), and thus can just “pick up and move.” They’re a “transient” population, after all. If you’re homeless in New York, you’re probably panhandling to The Mamas & the Papas on your AirPods. “I’ve been for a walk (I’ve been for a walk); On a winter’s day (on a winter’s day); I’d be safe and warm (I’d be safe and warm) If I was in L.A. (if I was in L.A.).”

In reality, that’s an absurd way to characterize the situation. If you’re homeless, your capacity to plan ahead — to look beyond today’s imperatives — is severely limited by a whole host of factors, not least of which are a prohibitive lack of financial resources, the threat of losing access to whatever local support networks you do have and, more generally, the daunting specter of trading familiar precarity for unfamiliar precarity in a new locale hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away. And that assumes you’re not suffering from severe mental health issues, addiction or both, in which case the idea of planning (let alone executing) a cross-country move wouldn’t even cross your mind, and would anyway be so completely infeasible it wouldn’t matter if it did.

In an effort to dispense with what I’ll call the “California Dreamin’ myth,” a team of PhDs, MDs and statisticians embarked on an ambitious study of homelessness in California, the results of which were detailed by the University of California, San Francisco in a June 2023 report spanning 96 pages.

In addition to being home (a rather unfortunate misnomer in this context) to around a third of America’s homeless, California accounts for roughly half of the nation’s unsheltered population which, according to HUD’s PIT count, rose every year since 2015 for a cumulative increase of 35%.

In the US context, “unsheltered” means exactly that: You’re homeless and you’re not sheltered. At night, you sleep on the sidewalk. Or in a car. Or in a park. Or in an abandoned building. The figure above also shows the PIT count for chronically homeless individuals. It reached a new record in 2022.

The UCSF study, the largest and by most accounts the most comprehensive, study of homelessness in the state in decades, was emphatic: California’s homeless population isn’t comprised of out-of-towners there for the nice weather and social perks. “People experiencing homelessness in California are Californians,” the report flatly declared. Indeed, 90% of the sample last lost their housing in California and 75% lost their housing in the very same county where they’re homeless.

Although mental health, addiction and a life history of stress and trauma were prevalent among survey participants, lead investigator Margot Kushel, a Yale MD who heads the Division of Vulnerable Populations at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, told the AP that, “People are homeless because their rent is too high, their options are too few and they have no cushion.” Makes sense. “And it really makes you wonder how different things would look if we could solve that underlying problem,” she added.

In the HUD data, six of the top 10 CoCs ranked by per capita experiences of homelessness were in California. In San Francisco, 95 out of every 10,000 people may be experiencing homelessness on any given night. On the other end of the spectrum is Dearborn, Michigan, where the incidence of homelessness is negligible. The median rent for a one bedroom in San Francisco is nearly $3,000, according to Zillow. In Dearborn, it’s $900. In Tuscaloosa, the CoC with the second-lowest per capital incidence of homelessness, the median for a one bedroom is likewise around $900.

I don’t pretend the figure shown above is a singular example of statistical brilliance, and there’s an entire constellation of factors which could influence the rate of homelessness in a given locale. Further, I can’t vouch for the veracity of the CoC counts (which puts me in good company because, as noted above, HUD can’t either), nor do I have any way of verifying the Zillow data. But the picture the chart paints is intuitive: The higher the rent, the higher the incidence of homelessness.

Given that, and given what we know about housing costs in places like San Francisco and New York City, it’s tempting to suggest this is only a crisis where housing affordability is spiraling completely out of control. In addition to being a bit tautological, the problem with that assessment is that incomes and job opportunities vary by locale too. Simply put: If the median rent is below $1,000 where you are, there’s probably a reason why.

There are two sides to the housing affordability equation. One is the cost of housing. The other is renters’ financial wherewithal, which is generally determined by the local economy. As the UCSF study put it, “high housing costs combined with low incomes left participants vulnerable to homelessness.” Where homelessness is most pervasive, it’s probably the case that housing costs are accelerating at a rate that outstrips wage growth by a wider margin than locales where per capita homelessness is lower, but note that housing affordability is spiraling out of control in more and more places. If that’s not strictly accurate, it’s fair to say that to the extent America had a housing affordability problem before the pandemic, it’s considerably worse and more pervasive now. Increasingly, the math doesn’t work anywhere.

Although the situation will always be more or less acute depending on locale, a Moody’s report published in January suggested the US is now “rent-burdened” on a nationwide basis, where that means the national average rent-to-income ratio reached 30% for the first time in more than two decades of tracking data. “Rising mortgage rates caused many households to be priced out from home buying and would-be buyers to remain renters,” economists for Moody’s wrote, in the report. “Apartment demand surged as a result and drove rates sky-high.”

At the risk of overgeneralizing, the implication is that the entire country, on average, is now at risk of a homelessness spiral. If, consistent with the Culhane study, communities can expect an inflection in homelessness once the share of local income spent on rent exceeds 32% and the average American tenant is now rent-burdened, then absent mitigation or intervention of some kind, the nation could experience a sharp increase in the incidence of homelessness.

In remarks quoted by The Hill, Moody’s economist Lu Chen cautioned that many low- and middle-income families are spending 40% or more of their income on rent. So, even if a given metro area hasn’t crossed the 30% threshold on average, that could belie a much more precarious situation among the median renter or renting family.

According to the 2023 vintage of a national housing report produced by the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard, the number of cost-burdened renters hit a record 21.6 million in 2021.

More than half of those renters were “severely” cost-burdened, where that means they spent more than 50% of their income on housing.

If you’re spending 50% of your income on housing, you likely don’t have much savings. Given that, it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that around 10 million renter families in America are one job loss or one serious adverse life event away from some type of homelessness.

Consistent with the message from the Moody’s report, JCHS noted that although cost-burden rates are obviously much higher the lower down the income ladder you go, they’re “rising quickly among those higher up the income scale, particularly among renters.” For example, in the two years from 2019 to 2021, the largest increase in the share of cost-burdened renters was observed in the $45,000 to $74,999 income bucket, where the cost-burden rate rose four percentage points to 34%. The median renter making below $30,000 in 2021 had just $380 left for a given month after paying for housing. That figure for homeowners making under $30,000 was significantly better, at $680, but that’s still barely enough to cover an emergency and anyway the lowest in at least two decades, again according to the Harvard study.

One path to homelessness entails a leaseholder transitioning to a non-leaseholder arrangement, where that can mean any number of things. In the UCSF study, the overall median monthly housing cost was quite low, but as the researchers were quick to point out, that “obscures” a lot of crucial nuance. Without delving too far into the specifics, there’s a cruel tradeoff for cost-burdened leaseholders: Although they may be able to significantly reduce their housing costs by transitioning to a non-leaseholder arrangement, such arrangements typically come with few, if any, legal protections, which means that if something goes wrong, there’s very little time to make alternate arrangements.

“Participants entering [homelessness] from non-leaseholder arrangements tended to have relatively low housing costs, but were staying in suboptimal — and impermanent — places,” the UCSF report said, adding that “many had left formal leaseholding arrangements at some point… but had forestalled homelessness through one or more non-leaseholding arrangements.” As for those who went directly from a leaseholding arrangement to homelessness, participants in the survey “described rapid descents precipitated by discrete events,” some of which (e.g., a family health crisis and wildfires) could happen to anyone. They often “navigated through a series of less stable and lower quality housing… includ[ing] moving from being a primary leaseholder to renting a room in a shared house, having multiple roommates or renting low-quality housing.” In other words, they exhausted their options. They did what they could.

Leaseholders were more likely than non-leaseholders to cite economic reasons for leaving their last housing. The report noted that, “The most frequently reported economic reason was loss of income.” Survey respondents who were “living on the economic margin, with high housing costs, low incomes and little savings, had little margin for error.” From a macro-level perspective, the problem is that more and more Americans are likely to fit that definition of economic precarity. High housing costs are a nationwide phenomenon and surveys suggesting four (or sometimes five) out of 10 households couldn’t fund an emergency with excess cash are so pervasive that the statistic is by now a cliché.

Incomes may be rising, but not as quickly as housing costs in many cases. As discussed here last month, the typical US homebuyer’s monthly mortgage is now approaching $2,900. That figure was $1,600 two years ago. Redfin data released in October showed the typical homebuyer needs to earn around 15% more than they did a year ago, which I gently called “problematic.” Wage growth is around 5%. So, wages may be rising in real terms overall, but not relative to the cost of owning a home. According to the same Redfin data, homebuyers now need to earn nearly $115,000 per year, some $40,000 more than the typical American makes. For context, that figure was $52,000 just 11 years ago. The median American doesn’t earn 121% more today than they did in 2012.

The implication is that the homeownership dream is slipping away from many people. That, in turn, means more renters. As the UCSF study described in arresting detail, renting can be perilous, particularly for non-leaseholders. Life events, and especially economic events, can transform leaseholders into non-leaseholders, non-leaseholders into homeless and, in more cases than you might be inclined to believe, leaseholders straight into homeless, virtually overnight.

Plainly, the cost of housing isn’t the only contributing factor to homelessness. The UCSF study made that abundantly clear. It’s an exhaustive effort, which delved deeply into social reasons for homelessness including interpersonal conflicts, violence and discrimination, as well as health-related issues including mental health conditions, substance abuse and caretaking responsibilities. For non-leaseholders, the most commonly-cited reasons for leaving their last housing were classified as social, whereas for leaseholders, economic reasons were paramount.

One way or another, it’s difficult to escape the notion that if housing were more affordable, many of the problems cited by the homeless would be less pervasive and for many may not come up at all. For example, arguments over money between cohabitating individuals can contribute to interpersonal conflicts and to substance abuse, and substance abuse can feed back into interpersonal conflicts both at home and at work in a multiplicative nightmare that materially increases the odds of calamity, economic and otherwise.

Addressing America’s affordable housing crisis is becoming more urgent all the time. It’s well beyond the scope of this article to present and assess myriad potential solutions to the problem. The point here is to suggest that this situation, like so many other national crises including those exacerbated by and intertwined with homelessness, may be approaching a tipping point. To reiterate: As of early this year, the average renter household in America was at or beyond the threshold identified as a leading indicator of rapidly rising homelessness.

While overall homelessness as measured by the latest HUD PIT count didn’t rise as much versus 2020 as one might expect given the soaring cost of housing, part of that is the legacy of pandemic assistance measures, many of which have expired. In addition, it’s worth noting that the overall population figure reflects a sharp drop in homelessness among people in families and veterans. As the National Alliance To End Homelessness noted, “these groups are often targeted by both government and non-governmental interventions due to factors such as vulnerability and history of military service.” That’s great, but robust progress there masks record-high homelessness among individuals, a record-high number of chronically homeless and virtually no progress on reducing the unsheltered homeless population.

It’s tempting to throw up one’s hands and despair that a country struggling to build enough attainable housing even for people and families with good jobs and decent credit has no hope of providing affordable shelter for society’s at-risk population. I’d say two things. First, policymakers need to figure it out, because if the trends cited above (and countless others like them) are any indication, the at-risk population could grow rapidly as the spiraling cost of housing turns families which might otherwise be stable and relatively prosperous into dysfunctional, cost-burdened renter households one lost job away from dissolution and wholesale precarity. Second, it’s actually easier than it sounds to address the needs of America’s existing homeless population. Note that easier doesn’t necessarily mean easy in any absolute sense, it just means that we know what works: It’s called supportive housing.

In a recent article for The New Yorker, Jennifer Egan documented life at 90 Sands, a supportive-housing facility in Brooklyn. She also dove into the lives of 90 Sands residents. The piece is vividly-rendered and, at times, riveting. A diagnosis of substance abuse disorder or serious mental illness is a prerequisite to qualify for supportive housing at the facility, which also includes affordable units designated for low- and middle-income New Yorkers. Life there is far from perfect. Drug use is prevalent (from January to May, eight people died from suspected overdoses) and as Egan put it, “the first weeks in a new home can be particularly volatile for people with serious mental-health or addiction issues, especially if they haven’t experienced stable housing in years or decades.” Case managers’ relationships with tenants can be tenuous, and as one administrator told Egan, “there are things that people do here, and behaviors that they engage in, that would very likely not be tolerated in other buildings.”

Egan is such an effective storyteller that it’s easy to lose track of the overarching message from the piece: Permanent supportive housing does work for the chronically homeless, who tend to have mental health issues, substance abuse problems or both. Indeed, it’s the only thing that seems to work. That category of homeless (which, as noted above, hit a record high in the latest PIT count) needs “long-term rent subsidies and support services to keep them stably housed,” as Egan wrote, adding that research suggests around 90% of homeless people who access supportive housing are still housed two years later.

But what about cost? How much would it cost to provide such services on a nationwide basis? Not that much, as it turns out. Not in absolute terms and certainly not relative to what America spends on what I’ll generously call less pressing issues. One estimate from Culhane puts the annual cost at around $10 billion: $5 billion for 400,000 permanent supportive housing vouchers (with Medicaid providing services) available to chronically homeless adults, and another $5 billion for rental assistance to non-chronically homeless adults, including rapid rehousing.

That’s not a precise estimate by any means, but it’s a ballpark figure. And, when considered against the sums America spends on, for example, defense, it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket. More germane, it’s less than the US currently spends on emergency shelter. Egan cited Culhane’s research in suggesting the US now spends in excess of $11 billion on emergency shelter, and that doesn’t count the cost of caring for the homeless when they experience crises and health events which require first responders, emergency rooms and, in some cases, long-term hospitalizations. A lot of that spending could be eliminated with permanent supportive housing.

In 2002, Culhane, along with two other researchers from Penn, put the cost to taxpayers of one homeless, mentally ill person on the streets of New York City at more than $40,000 a year in 1999 dollars, or around $70,000 today. “Regression results reveal that persons placed in supportive housing experience marked reductions in shelter use, hospitalizations, length of stay per hospitalization and time incarcerated,” the authors wrote. “Before placement, homeless people with severe mental illness used about $40,449 per person per year in services.” After placement, the cost of services fell by more than $16,000 per housing unit per year. That study is famous. It’s colloquially known as “The Culhane Report.”

Homelessness on the island I called home for the last seven years was nonexistent. It’s a resort town, after all. If you saw a family sleeping on the beach, they were camping. Usually 25 yards or so from their Robb Report beachfront property.

Here, where I live now (and again), homelessness is on the rise. Two decades ago, there were no homeless people downtown, or if there were, you didn’t see them. There are hundreds now and thousands if you include the entire area covered by the local CoC. In the latest HUD PIT estimate, the number of homeless here rose 50% from the prior year’s count. A third were counted as unsheltered, and half of the unsheltered were deemed chronically homeless. Less than 20% of the total homeless population in the city suffers from a serious mental illness or drug abuse problem, according to the figures.

The city took millions in federal funding to address local homelessness in the past year, including more than a million in HUD CoC grants. The city doesn’t operate its own shelters, relying instead on a loose network of ministries and charities. HUD funds are distributed among that network.

Overwhelmingly, locals (including city officials themselves) say policy initiatives are the only way to address the situation. There’s also unanimity on the cause of the problem: Housing is increasingly unaffordable. The median home price here rose 57% from September of 2020 to September of 2023, according to Redfin.

The same Redfin data suggests the vast majority of people moving to the city come from just five places: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City and Chicago. That’s hardly surprising. Property values are comparatively cheap here compared to California and New York, and crime has prompted some wealthy Chicago residents to consider moving.

When I spoke to buyer’s agents as I was preparing to move over the summer, I heard the same story again and again. Out-of-town money was driving up property values inexorably. This was (and still is) a boom town where prices benefited dramatically from buyers fleeing the most expensive locales in the country. That influx of money pushed property values up faster than local incomes. A few blocks down from me, a friendly couple in their fifties just completed a lavish renovation of a two bedroom, two bath space they own in addition to their single-family in the suburbs. They’re renting the space for $7,500 per month.

I remember when it all fell apart here all those years ago, but I don’t remember why we were arguing. We had plenty of money and no cares.

When the shouting was over, she sat smoking in the hallway next to the front door with her arms folded around her knees, her left hand clutching a pack of Marlboro Reds that matched her right shoulder, where the deep red heart in a Frank-N-Furter “BOSS” tattoo was painted on the palest canvas. I leaned against the opposite wall. She was three reds in when the knock finally came.

He looked at me, then at her, then back at me. “Go on,” she said, waving her cigarette hand dismissively at us. We walked past the living room, where a shattered plasma TV and a broken vase testified to irreconcilability. “She broke the vase,” I offered.

I waited outside the bedroom while he extricated the safe from the closet, where it was bolted to the floor. We hauled it down the stairs, past the living room, through the hall and out the door to the black Denali SUV waiting outside. When I looked back, she’d already shut the door. We drove in silence to the apartment I kept on the other side of town. Not long after, I was half a world away in Manhattan.

Nothing about my trajectory since that night felt credible, and the plot seemed to become more implausible as time went on. Coming back here would, at the least, feel like coming home. Or so I imagined. Instead, it reinforced the wholly irrational, but nevertheless unsettling, sense of purgatory I’ve lived with for nearly two decades. You can’t, as it turns out, go home again.

It was below freezing here today when I stepped outside for my predawn walk. The city advises local service providers to take in the homeless on cold nights regardless of whether they qualify for admission under program conditions. No one was sleeping outside at the church.

The streets were empty except for the trolleys and someone (a man or woman I couldn’t tell) huddled on one of the benches at the nearest stop. The pile of blankets stood up as the trolley approached, a sheet ghost waiting for the bus, but it was too early. Passengers weren’t allowed for another hour. The bus trundled by without braking. The ghost watched it pass, looked back up the street towards me, then settled back down onto the bench.

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