Even small rent increases in these cities make people homeless

As rents climb across the U.S., more people are being driven into homelessness.

In some of the country’s hottest housing markets, rent increases have a strong connection with upticks in the homeless population, according to a study released this week from real-estate website Zillow. In New York City, a 5% rent hike would lead to nearly 3,000 more people becoming homeless. In Los Angeles, the same increase in rent would leave around 2,000 people without a place to live.

To produce the report, Zillow created a model that analyzed different variables, including how population growth and changes in rent affect the homelessness rate. The model also considered the accuracy of homeless counts. Zillow then passed Census population figures, homelessness counts and its own rental data through the model to determine the relationship between rental prices and homelessness in different cities. The Census population numbers also take into account people who move in or out of a city, including those who may have moved elsewhere for cheaper housing.

New York and Los Angeles, along with Washington, D.C. and Seattle, witnessed homelessness rates climb by at least 4% between 2011 and 2016, Zillow noted. The supply of affordable rental housing in many cities is so limited that it cannot meet demand, causing the rise in both rental costs and homelessness, said Zillow senior economist Skylar Olsen. “We’ve seen so much pressure in rental-housing markets that it’s created a rental affordability crisis that has spilled over into a homelessness crisis at lower-income levels,” Olsen said.

In many cities, the median low-wage income isn’t sufficient to cover the cost of renting a low-end apartment. In New York, median bottom-tier rents represent 111.8% of the median low-income wage, Zillow found. For Los Angeles and San Francisco, that figures is 107.8% and 99.9% respectively.

Affordability problems for people who earn less money aren’t exclusive to expensive cities. In Philadelphia, Tampa and Houston, someone making the median low income will have to spend well over half of her income on rent.

For many of the people driven out of their homes by higher rents, being homeless means living on the streets. In Los Angeles, only 25% of people who were homeless were sheltered in any way, data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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Homelessness is often due to a confluence of factors, including low wages and high rents. In popular housing markets, data has shown that the cost of rent is increasing at such a pace that it’s exceeding the money many retirees earn from Social Security. In New York, hundreds of people working for the city are forced to live in homeless shelters because they cannot afford rent. And 14% of community college students are homeless, according to a study by the Wisconsin Hope Lab, an organization that researches college affordability, and the Association of Community College Trustees.

While the connection between rising rents and increasing levels of homelessness is strong in cities like New York or Seattle, that’s not the case elsewhere. Zillow noted that Houston and Tampa both saw their homeless population decrease even as rents went up between 2011 and 2016.

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In Houston’s case, the decrease is particularly notable since the city had one of the worst homelessness rates in the country back in 2010. Today, a 10% increase in rent would only leave 135 more people homeless — comparatively, more than 6,000 individuals would be without a place to live if a similar increase occurred in New York. Local agencies and organizations in the city have led a coordinated marketing campaign to landlords so that more units were specifically targeted to homeless people. These groups also use data to drive where they invest funding to combat homelessness.

Tampa took a different approach. The county sheriff’s department there rethought its approach to homeless people. Police officers began to ask homeless individuals what they needed and found that many couldn’t get jobs because of a lack of identification, so the department helped them get Social Security cards and IDs through driver’s license offices. Now there are eight sheriff’s deputies whose sole task is to get homeless people what they need. Additionally, a nonprofit in the city led an effort to place homeless veterans into furnished apartments.

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Tampa and Houston aren’t alone: Other cities with falling homelessness rates between 2011 and 2016 included Chicago, San Diego and Atlanta.

Zillow also argued in its report that the current methods of estimating the number of homeless people across the country are problematic. Local, one-night homeless counts are conducted periodically, and their findings are used to extrapolate an estimated figure of an area’s homeless population.

HUD estimated that more than half a million people “experienced homelessness for at least one night in 2016,” the report said, based on local counts the department collected. But counts like these may only capture just 59% of the actual homeless population, according to a 2008 study in the American Journal of Public Health. As Zillow notes, changes in weather or the number of volunteers can significantly affect the accuracy of a count.

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