Across US places, homelessness tracks rent and vacancy, not the individual conditions usually blamed. Colburn and Aldern, as Klein and Thompson report, find poorer cities do not have more homelessness, drug use explains about 5% of the variation between places, and the count rises with rent and falls with vacancy. Individual conditions decide who loses the chair; the number of chairs decides how many lose. Grade: cross-place correlations, not a trial; it explains variation between places, not any one person's path.

Evidence 4 passages

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  An obvious place to begin is poverty rates. Does more poverty predict more homelessness? No. A number of cities with high rates of poverty, Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, have low rates of homelessness. It is richer cities with low overall poverty rates that see more homelessness.

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  More drug use explains only about 5% of the difference between places.

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  As the cost of rent rises, so too does the number of homeless. As a vacancy rate plummets, meaning that the housing market is tight with too many buyers and too few sellers, homelessness rises.

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  If you live in a city with too few homes, poverty and drug abuse and unemployment and mental illness make it likelier that you will be among those who end up without a home. But the cause of homelessness isn't the poverty or the addiction or the unemployment.

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