Start here · Housing · A six-essay series
How to Think About Homelessness
Six short essays. Almost everything we believe about why people are homeless is a story about individuals: their addictions, their illnesses, their choices, the hospitals we once emptied. Most of the pieces take one of those stories seriously, then ask what the evidence actually says.
These six pieces share one idea. Almost every argument about homelessness runs two questions together. Why did this person end up without a home? And why does this place have the number of people it does?
Individual trouble (an addiction, an illness, a hard turn of luck) goes a long way toward answering the first. It says almost nothing about the second. The size of the crowd is set by something else: how many homes the lowest earners can actually afford. One thing decides who. A different thing decides how many.
Build too few homes within reach and the crowd grows; build enough and it shrinks. That is the thread running under all six.
Several words in these essays are terms of art. The count of homeless people is a narrower thing than the number of people without a home, and which law you are reading decides who is inside it. Each of them is defined in Words the Agencies Use, with the law named wherever one governs.
The same mistake, told six ways.
Most of these essays take on a version of the same belief: that homelessness is, at bottom, a story about the people who fall into it. The drugs. The illness. The old decision to close the hospitals. The bad luck. Every one of those is real in a life, and not one of them explains the number on the street. The first essay comes at it from the other side and shows the shortage being made in plain view: a neighborhood of homes taken by policy, on purpose.
The number moves with what we build and what we fund: it came down in Houston, which paid rent in its relatively affordable apartments, and in Finland, which built and funded housing, though Finland's count has risen since 2024. That is the hopeful part, and it is the reason these pieces exist: not to argue that no one struggles, but to point at the one lever that actually moves the count, so we stop pulling all the others and wondering why nothing changes.
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