Numbers Game

Seattle has a fairly sizable homeless population. While a lot of people blame this on the presence of Amazon in the city (although I've never understood why them, specifically) the large homeless population here stood out for me when I first arrived at the end of 1996, long before Amazon was hiring large numbers of people for high salaries.

This has been making waves again because of a new count, which places the number of homeless people in Seattle at somewhere north of 12,000 individuals. What I heard about this, more than once on my drive home this evening, is that means that Seattle ranks 3rd in the nation in terms of its homeless population. This article by Zillow from a year ago breaks out the numbers, estimating that Seattle had 12,763 homeless citizens. But the number two slot went to Los Angeles with 61,398, nearly a factor of four. And it would take every homeless person in Seattle moving to L.A. for that city to catch up with New York, with its estimate of 76,341.

What strikes me as strange about the emphasis is that it seems to call attention to the problem, but not really help put it in perspective. Using per-capita numbers, which give (based on 2017 figures for homelessness and population) approximately 1 in 113 people in New York as homeless, 1 in 65 in Los Angeles and 1 in 57 in Seattle paints a much more useful picture, but makes the city come off worse in comparison, with a higher percentage of homeless people. (It's worth keeping in mind that homelessness is concentrated in urban areas. Between them, Seattle, New York and Los Angeles had nearly a third of the nation's estimated homeless population in 2017. Add in San Diego, the other metropolitan area with a homeless population above 10,000 individuals, and you're pretty much there.)

I suspect that the reason for the framing is that this is how the information was presented. I was able to find a few different news stories scattered around the nation at the top of a Google search, and they all ranked the cities in terms of the overall numbers. It's likely that this was simply repeated, because it makes for a good headline.

How Seattle sets out to tackle the problem will be interesting, given that, housing affordability and housing as an investment are at odds, at least as long as we're talking about the same home. (It's possible, as was pointed out in the comments, to get around this, as long as someone tears down the older homes and builds more units in the same general footprint; in other words, subsequent generations receive less for their money.) Given that a lot of the run-up in home prices that has been driving homelessness is a result of regulations that many Seattle-area residents are wedded to (because it drives up home values) it's going to be a difficult mountain to move.