Dispassionate

"There are so many people on the streets. Why don't we have more compassion in the world?" someone asked me. "After all, it doesn't cost anything."

"It does when it actually changes something," I replied.

Seattle's seemingly inescapable homelessness problem is often chalked up to a lack of compassion, an assessment that I, personally, don't subscribe to. I think that people in Seattle have a lot of compassion for the homeless. What's lacking is the willingness to pay the costs that converting that compassion into solutions would entail.

A co-worker recently married, and he and his wife are buying their first home. While I don't have the exact numbers (as they are, after all, none of my business) the couple can expect to pay about two million dollars for the home, and the financing, assuming that they stay in it long enough to pay it off. For that home to become wealth (generational or otherwise) it's going to have to appreciate enough to keep up with the money that they're paying the current owner and their bank. There's no real path to both that happening, and solving the problem of local homelessness.

Sure, one could posit that someone builds a large number of homes and somehow manages to reserve them for the exclusive use of the legitimately homeless, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly realistic outcome, mainly because it would take a remarkable charitable endowment to fund. A better plan would be to remove some (if not all) of the artificial constraints that have been placed on the ability to create sufficient housing stock, like the Growth Management Act, which has been understood for years now (by everyone except rabble-rousing politicians, it seems) to have pushed up housing prices well beyond what one would otherwise expect.

But that, even more so than an economic slowdown, would kick the legs out from under current home prices; at least once construction really ramped up. And while people working to pay off high mortgages may not have a lot of excess resources to spend, it's a safe bet that they'll spend what they can in order to avoid taking a substantial loss on their homes. Because why would anyone expect them to do anything else? Simply to bring local home prices in line with the national average would mean cutting them by nearly 50%. Asking someone to forego nearly half a million dollars to benefit someone else is always a hard sell. And the longer the problem persists, the higher price of homes rises, the greater the sacrifice that people would need to be asked to make. That's a high bar to clear in the name of compassion.

And so nothing happens, outside of complaining and political grandstanding masquerading as public policy.

If the point behind democracy is to have governments act in accordance with the will of the public at large, it's worth remembering that like any other sovereign, the public is not accountable to anyone for what it collectively wants. Its demands don't need to be workable, or even realistic.

The high price of housing in the Seattle area has the effect or making people feel financially straited (often with good reason). This, in turn, makes the ever-increasing costs of a genuine solution even less palatable. And so the cycle continues.

In the end, I think that interrupting (let alone ending) the cycle of increasing home prices putting people on the street and leaving them little means of leaving it again is going to come down to luck more than judgement. Something will begin to pull people away from high-cost cities to lower-cost ones. Maybe it does so quickly, and home prices collapse, or it does so more slowly, and prices drift, rather than plummet. Either way, the solution is likely to come from the demand side of the equation, where compassion need play less of a role.