Municipal land-use restrictions and homelessness
Vancouver has a big lever it's not using
I was talking to someone the other day who said that homelessness (a major issue in the DTES) is a problem that municipalities can't solve on their own, they simply don't have the resources. So their main way to tackle the problem is by lobbying the provincial and federal governments. (This wasn't someone in municipal government, just an observer.)
It's true that there's many factors outside municipal control, and that the provincial and federal governments will need to be involved. But in fact municipalities like Vancouver do have one big lever that they're not using. That's their control over land use and housing.
Because we set up anti-growth institutions back in the 1970s, housing is scarce and expensive. And because housing is a ladder - it's all connected - that results in tremendous pressure on people near the bottom of the housing ladder. When we're reluctant to build market housing because we think it's too expensive, the people who would have lived there don't vanish into thin air: they move down the housing ladder and we get trickle-down evictions.
In cities in the US South, where they have plenty of problems with drug addiction and mental illness, and warm weather, but housing is much cheaper, homelessness is much lower than in places like California or New York or Boston.
What seems to be going on is that in cities where housing costs are more reasonable, there's a kind of private safety net in the form of spare rooms. People have extra space that they can lend to a family member or a friend who's in danger of losing their housing. In Vancouver, space is too scarce and expensive for that - people may already be doubled up themselves. (It's pretty hard to couch-surf at a friend's place when that friend has roommates, versus when they're living alone.)
Plus of course when market rents are lower, the cost of providing non-market housing is also lower. How Houston cut homelessness by nearly two-thirds.
Great post, Russil! You're spot-on about Vancouver's housing crisis and the underused lever of land-use policy. Easing restrictions could unlock more affordable options, and cooperative housing models could amplify this by empowering communities to collectively own and manage homes, creating a stronger safety net for those most at risk. Keep pushing these ideas!
Yep. I started but didn't finish the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, and it pointed this out early on, homelessness rates are lower in places where addiction rates are higher and absolute housing costs are lower, yet in expensive coastal cities, most people are so confused about the macro causes of homelessness and street disorder that they blame addiction to drugs. Of course, in individual cases, it is the case that addiction was a causal factor explaining why an individual became homeless, but at a macro scale it become obvious that the absolute cost of housing drives most homelessness.