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January/February 2023 Issue
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Ideas


THE OBVIOUS ANSWER TO HOMELESSNESS

And why everyone’s ignoring it

By Jerusalem Demsas

Danielle Del Plato
December 12, 2022
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Updated at 2:52 p.m. ET on December 23, 2022.

When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them.
What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from
getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could
afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific
tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness
is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t
happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who
experience it.


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But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s
homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why
are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates
of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the
interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who
study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game
begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few
kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than
the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the
last available seat.



You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual
kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an
inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t
enough of them.

Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically
becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created
by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire
shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of
people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is
self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but
it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.

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