A Rising Tide Drowns Unstable Boats: How Inequality Creates Homelessness

Published date01 January 2021
DOI10.1177/0002716220981864
AuthorAnthony W. Orlando,Thomas H. Byrne,Benjamin F. Henwood
Date01 January 2021
Subject MatterStructural Forces
28 ANNALS, AAPSS, 693, January 2021
DOI: 10.1177/0002716220981864
A Rising Tide
Drowns
Unstable Boats:
How Inequality
Creates
Homelessness
By
THOMAS H. BYRNE,
BENJAMIN F. HENWOOD,
and
ANTHONY W. ORLANDO
981864ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYA RISING TIDE DROWNS UNSTABLE BOATS
research-article2020
Is income inequality a driver of homelessness at the
community level? We theorize that inequality affects
homelessness both by crowding out low-income house-
holds from the rental market (what we call an “income
channel”) and by causing home prices to rise (a “price
channel”). We construct a dataset of information on
inequality, homelessness, rent burden, and housing
prices in 239 communities from 2007 to 2018 and use
it to assess the income inequality–homelessness rela-
tionship. Our results suggest that income inequality is a
significant driver of community homelessness and that
the “income channel” is the more likely mechanism
through which homelessness is created. We argue that
broader policy efforts to reduce income inequality are
likely to have the collateral effect of reducing home-
lessness, and we discuss the need for national and local
policies to help low-income households afford housing.
Keywords: homelessness; income inequality; housing;
housing cost; cities
Does income inequality have an impact on
homelessness? Answering this question
would improve our understanding of the struc-
tural drivers of homelessness and, consequently,
could help to develop policy responses aimed at
reducing the scope of homelessness. We are
not the first to pose this question or to seek
answers to it, but this study provides what we
believe is the most rigorous empirical response
to the question to date. We find that increases
in local income inequality appear to be an
important driver of increases in homelessness.
More pointedly, our analysis suggests that in a
community of 740,000 people (roughly the
population of Seattle, which is the average size
of the communities in the dataset we use), an
Thomas H. Byrne is an assistant professor at the Boston
University School of Social Work and an investigator at
the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Center for
Healthcare Outcomes and Implementation Research
and National Center on Homelessness among Veterans.
Correspondence: tbyrne@bu.edu
A RISING TIDE DROWNS UNSTABLE BOATS 29
increase in local income inequality that tracks the average increase in the United
States between 2007 and 2018 translates into roughly 200 additional people who
are homeless in that community on a given night. While the precise impact of
income inequality on homelessness appears to vary as a function of whether we
consider persons who are homeless as individuals or persons in families, or those
who are sheltered as opposed to unsheltered, our results point clearly to a key
role for income inequality in generating homelessness.
Before delving too deeply into the answer to our central question, however, it
is necessary to place this question in the appropriate conceptual and empirical
context. Thus, we proceed by first examining the rise of contemporary homeless-
ness in the United States and related research seeking to identify the structural
determinants of homelessness. We then discuss the rise of income inequality in
the United States and present an explication of the theoretical mechanisms by
which income inequality and homelessness could be linked. We then describe
the data and analytic approach that we use to assess the extent to which inequality
is associated with homelessness in the United States and give a full description of
the results of that analysis. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implica-
tions of our findings for policy responses to homelessness.
The Search for Structural Determinants of
Contemporary Homelessness
Homelessness in the United States is a long-standing problem. Since the Great
Depression, there have been transient workers who lacked a fixed geographic
home or were socially disconnected (Hopper 1991). “Modern-day” homelessness,
however, is a more recent phenomenon (Lee, Tyler, and Wright 2010). The arche-
typical portrayal of contemporary homelessness as individuals bedding down on
sidewalks, in doorways, and other public places first emerged in the 1980s, and
homelessness is widely believed to have increased during that decade. Today, the
scope of the problem remains substantial by any measure, and homelessness con-
tinues to garner public attention. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) estimates that, on a given night in 2019, 567,715 people in
the United States were experiencing homelessness, with one-third in unsheltered
situations and two-thirds in sheltered situations (HUD 2020).
Benjamin F. Henwood is an associate professor and the director of the Center for Homelessness,
Housing and Health Equity Research at the University of Southern California Suzanne
Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He is a lead author in the American Academy of Social
Work and Social Welfare’s The Grand Challenge of Ending Homelessness.
Anthony W. Orlando is an assistant professor of finance, real estate, & law and Donor’s Scholar
of Analytics at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a visiting scholar at the
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and faculty affiliate of the USC Bedrosian Center on
Governance and the Public Enterprise.
NOTE: The authors wish to acknowledge Leah Boustan for providing the data and code that
were essential in constructing the measures of income inequality that we used in this study.

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT