The Homelessness Blame Game: Let’s Challenge That

Just about everyone in Seattle knows why we have a homelessness crisis. Or they seem to. In fact, these confident observers don’t just have vague ideas; they have firm convictions informed by what they see on the streets, what they hear from housed neighbors, and what they gather from TV anchors and Talk Radio Jocks. We, however, think these armchair quarterbacks are wrong, and we write to offer an alternative explanation that Seattle homeowners won’t instinctively embrace.

But first, why do we reject the conventional wisdom?

First, very few of these local pundits seem to have read any of the academic literature on homelessness, and even fewer have ever bothered to talk with someone who is unhoused. In addition, and perhaps more telling, they have wildly different answers to the “why” question. It’s like watching a Jackson Pollack painting: What will stick to the canvass?

On social media, we hear that the primary cause of homelessness is:

• Substance abuse. Repeatedly we are told that rough sleepers in Seattle are drug addicts and alcoholics. The evidence is visible: “open air drug markets,” needles, bottles, tin foil left in camps, homeless people behaving erratically.
• Mental illness. Almost as often we are told that unhoused folks are crazy or unhinged and cognitively impaired. This, too, we see with our own eyes. They don’t behave normally.
• Parents. Some folks tell us that folks on the street have been abused or neglected by their parents. The unhoused didn’t get a proper upbringing.
• Poverty. The poor, we hear, are naturally going to end up on the street, regardless of underlying conditions. They are the have-nots, after all.
• Weather. Temperate climates on the West Coast, some argue, are amenable to campers, while harsher climates are not.
• Lavish services. We live in “Freeattle,” it is often said. The unhoused congregate here because progressive churches in Seattle (deemed enablers) provide a free breakfast of meat blanquette on mashed potatoes, even though it might be overcooked. And because left-wing politicians have brazenly agreed to finance some shelters and tiny homes.

There are other reasons offered, but these are the ones we hear most often. Why do we reject them?

The primary cause of homelessness, according to almost all the experts who have studied this issue, is lack of housing. When a local jurisdiction fails to supply sufficient housing, someone is going to end up unhoused. And it should not be surprising that those who end up unhoused are those who are disabled or vulnerable, for whatever reason (substance abuse, mental illness, family trauma, poverty, racism, etc.).

UW professor Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Aldern have written an empirically rich book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” that tries to explain why cities like Seattle, LA, San Francisco, New York and Boston suffer from a high level of homelessness while cities like Milwaukee, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit and Houston do not. Neither individual factors nor environmental and political factors explain the results. Their findings dovetail with the conclusions of other analysts:

• Substance abuse is a major problem in the unhoused community, perhaps as a cause of homelessness but also often as a result of homelessness. Either way, there is no evidence of greater drug and alcohol abuse in places with high rates of homelessness. In fact, some places with extraordinarily high levels of substance abuse (like West Virginia) have relatively low levels of homelessness.
• Mental illness also does not appear to be an underlying cause of homelessness. Cities and counties with disproportionately large numbers of unhoused people do not appear to also have unusually high numbers of mentally ill people. In fact, none of those cities and counties were listed in a 2017 study by the CDC of the 10 places with the highest prevalence of mental challenges.
• Bad parents are everywhere. (This variable is not analyzed in Colburn and Aldern’s study.)
• Poverty is not a major driver of homelessness. Cities with very high rates of poverty – like Detroit and Cleveland – have relatively low levels of homelessness. In fact, the most affluent cities tend to be the ones with higher levels of homelessness.  Of course cities without adequate housing have more homelessness, and these people have become impoverished, and will remain so until housing is available.
• Cold weather does not deter homelessness. New York City and Boston have frigid winters, but very high levels of homelessness. What’s different from the West Coast is that almost all unhoused folks in those East Coast cities sleep in shelters.
• Progressive policies don’t explain regional variation in homelessness. Cities like Chicago and Philadelphia have been led by politicians that are just as “liberal” or “permissive” as their counterparts in Seattle and Boston, but they have had far lower rates of homelessness.

The only thing that explains the regional variation in levels of homelessness is the supply of housing, according to Colburn and Aldern.

This does not mean that individual factors are inconsequential. In our own work on the streets of Seattle, we have found a common denominator — trauma — among the unhoused. In his 2025 book, Paul Blankenship calls it “soul woundedness” — the tragic reality that most if not all folks without a home are hobbled by a deep, debilitating sense of despair, of hopelessness. This leads them to use drugs, to experience mental illness, or to give up on the world and themselves. But it doesn’t “cause” them to be homeless.

Colburn and Aldern use the metaphor of musical chairs: If there are not enough chairs, someone will always lose. The losers will almost inevitably be those who are slower, more distracted.

Likewise, in the game of “housing,” when there are not enough homes, someone will always lose. The losers will be those who are somehow disabled: addicted, mentally ill, or traumatized.

This means that, in a place like Seattle where there is not enough housing, the losers are those we see on the streets. But this doesn’t mean that individual “failures” explain why those folks on the street are homeless. It means that, given the constraints, they are the ones who will lose this awful game.

It’s a simple message (homelessness is a housing problem), but it’s also a deeply unwelcome one in our relatively affluent community. Colburn receives a high volume of vitriolic email. In a recent tweet, Andrea Suarez, the director of “We Heart Seattle,” a group that views homelessness as an individual failing by drug addicts, exhorted her 11,000 followers to torch the Colburn/Aldern book: “Post pictures of you burning it.”

Imagine loathing a scholarly book so much you want others to ritually destroy it.

Far more popular is the belief that flawed individuals, abetted by feckless politicians, are responsible for homelessness. One reason to embrace such a view is that it relieves us from any guilt for the problem. We aren’t to blame, one can easily conclude. It’s the fault of the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the politicians – everyone but you and me.

Except that we did cause the problem of homelessness. We caused it when we fought zoning changes that would have allowed more apartments or accessory units in our single family neighborhoods, or insisted on onerous permitting requirements and lengthy regulatory reviews that dramatically drove up the cost of new housing construction. We caused it when we rallied against shelters, tiny home villages, low-income housing. We caused it when we kept saying “Not in My Backyard.”

To be sure, King County needs better rehab programs and mental health services. And our courts probably should require more unhoused lawbreakers to undergo treatment to avoid long prison sentences.

But if we really want to eliminate homelessness in Seattle, we must embrace Mayor Wilson’s proposals to build more permanent and transitional housing throughout the city. Greater density and fewer zoning and permitting restrictions will help stabilize skyrocketing rents. Additional shelter and tiny home beds will pull folks from the streets. Better services for substance abusers and the mentally ill will move many of those folks out of shelter and into permanent, stable housing they can maintain over time.

We created this problem; we can fix it.