Causes of Inter-city Variation in Homelessness

Kathryn Nelson, and Cordelia Reimers for helpful comments, and Franco Pignataro for his exceptionally meticulous programming assistance. Using the Department of Housing and Urban Development's estimates of the homeless population, the investigators present reduced-form findings as a first attempt to measure comprehensively and systematically the underlying causes of homelessness. The working assumption throughout is that homelessness results from an imbalance between the cost of available housing and a household's income. Two conditions related to homelessness--crowded and doubled-up housing--are also analyzed. The investigators conclude that even a small, intuitively appealing set of factors can explain variations in homelessness across American cities and that homelessness has many roots: in housing markets, labor markets, and public policies regarding the institutionalization of the mentally ill and the treatment of the low-income population. Causes of Intercity Variation in Homelessness I