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Why housing shortages cause homelessness
Why do high-cost cities have more homelessness? It's not just about rents — it’s also about the rooms friends and family can’t afford to share.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) orchestrates an annual Point-in-Time count each January, striving to enumerate all those who are sleeping that night in shelters or ‘unsheltered’, a designation which includes tents, shacks, and vehicles. When Meyer’s team statistically matched the homeless to a sample of the ‘single, housed poor’ with the same demographic characteristics, they found comparable levels of employment, job instability, welfare receipt, and disability insurance. But in more expensive regions, fewer parents (or other loving figures) have that resource, either because they couldn’t afford to buy a house in the first place or because there are demands from multiple family members to share the legacy residence.
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