Why does the severity of the contemporary homelessness crisis vary so sharply across U.S. metropolitan areas? Lay explanations, implicating everything from differences in law enforcement to weather to social service provision to poverty to rental housing costs, abound. But careful empirical examinations are scarce. Those that do exist have converged on metro differences in rental housing affordability as a key explanation, while conceding that other untested factors may be implicated.
In this study, we propose and test the hypothesis that metro differences in the availability of public housing units may supplement rental housing affordability in explaining divergence in metro rates of homeless residents. Public housing diverges from private housing, which are dwellings owned by private companies or individuals that may be leased out to renter households. Public housing units are owned, or heavily subsidized in some way by, a government entity. In the U.S. context, both federal and local governments typically play a role, the former by providing the bulk of financial resources, the latter by administering programs that oversee each type of public housing available in the jurisdiction through local housing authorities.
Slides: UW_PublicHousing_PPTSummary_vF