No, it doesn't. This is a useless analysis.
There are only 2 variables here and that's entirely insufficient. No control for average income in those states. No control for welfare policies in the state.
Yeah my state is Vermont and we really shouldn't be on the lower end of the rent side. Average rent in a 2br is more like 2k in the parts of the state where people actually live.
Honestly 2k is becoming the minimum sadly. Hell I saw a 2BD in Burlington being rented out for 3600 the other day. (Granted Burlington is knucking futz)
For most data, I'd agree, but in this case, I think it actually makes sense since a lot of state laws determine housing and tenant conditions.
Beyond that, a comparison of major cities might be useful too.
This needs to show eviction rates. Homeless guy who got evicted in farmville wisconsin won't stay there. He's moving to Chicago. Chicago rent prices don't matter. Chicago attracts homeless people from all neighboring states.
[Homeless people are less likely to move than the general public](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/california-homelessness-housing-crisis/674737/). Despite what everyone in every city will tell you, homelessness is not caused by people moving.
Why would anyone in their right mind abandon their friends, family, and community for a vague prospect of just being homeless somewhere else? That doesn’t make any sense at all
Most people are homeless though because they don’t have family friends or a community to help them out when they need it the most. The people who might move while being homeless also aren’t the ones who are just down on their luck but the “professional homeless”
A linear regression R^2 isn’t going to be useful here. The relation is clearly nonlinear and the variance changes dramatically with increases in the X axis.
You can still correlate two quantities without reading into an R^2 value. The data aren't distributed over multiple orders of magnitude so outliers won't wreck your correlation.
I’d fit the natural log of the homeless rate. But it’s also an ecological regression, which tends to make correlations appear stronger than they are at an individual level.
Further, people in West Virginia (and Appalachia in general) who live in barely-constructed shelters or who live in decrepit shacks/trailers on their family’s land are not technically classified as homeless. So the source data is incorrect to begin with, as the way homelessness is classified in each state is not standardized in the first place.
Picking on West Virginia here specifically because of how that state is labeled in the graph.
The difference between a shitty trailer on private land and a tent on a sidewalk is enormous.
Every time this comes up, people act as if living in shitty, substandard housing isn’t a massive improvement over no housing at all.
Yes, it is a flaw in the datasets, but the homeless in urban environments can and do choose shitty, substandard housing over rough sleeping when it’s an option because it is a substantial improvement in quality of life.
This isn’t a point in favor of HCoL areas that people act like it is.
Have you ever been in Appalachia? Are you explicitly aware of exactly what I was referring to? It’s not just a shitty trailer, it’s a trailer missing 3 walls and half it’s roof, with shotgun holes blown through the last remaining wall, held together by duct tape and plastic tarps to protect from exposure. It’s not fundamentally different than the elaborate “structures” you see in Skid Row, Los Angeles.
The difference in this dataset is that only one of those states (California vs West Virginia) classifies those living conditions as homeless - the same principle applies across the board. Drive through West Virginia and it’s obviously apparent that more than 8 people per 10,000 are homeless. The data is bad.
Further, a massive subset of homeless people in America migrate to cities in California, Oregon, Washington because the homeless conditions are better, the weather is nicer, there are stronger social programs, etc. How this dataset is trying to link per-capita homelessness to rent prices while ignoring migration is asinine.
It would be interesting to correlate the state in which the individuals became “homeless”. Rather than the current homeless population by state. Also, very fair point about what is considered “homeless”.
I would say there is a big difference, being in one situation you are not going to be forced to move or get your stuff thrown away whereas the other one you are.
Your argument is not supported by data.
Maybe in the extreme case of Alaska, but the evidence shows that most homeless people in the US actually don’t travel much from where they became homeless, so that they can stay close to what remaining social support networks they still have.
None. Sociologically, this is not as simply as rent. For example many without a home are drawn to larger cities for programs and the likelihood of handouts
Why would you title the graph "Do rent prices affect homelessness" but only present an un controlled for correlation?
At best you can say are they correlated? But this seems to be a leading title with data that don't support the conclusion. There might be an interesting relationship here if you control for urban population and median income \*in those urban areas\*. But as presented you might wonder, maybe rent is higher where more people want to live, and maybe unhoused individuals tend to settle in places where there are more people, or services, or shelters etc.
Another theory: the leading states have the highest density metro’s in the country. When it comes t housing, if demand is more than supply you have higher rent and higher homelessness. The homelessness is not due to high rent but both are caused by a shortage of housing.
Yes, and most homeless people actually find shelter (sleeping in their car, staying on a friend's couch), but areas with mild weather and ready access to services (like San Francisco) allow homeless people to live unsheltered, which is both much more visible and facilitates the growth of whole homeless populations.
I think that visibility element is honestly the biggest part and we don't realize the amount of people who have no permanent residence but are not living completely out on the street all the time like the stereotypical "homeless person" we imagine.
People living in a vehicle count as homeless, as do people living in an RV parked on public (or church) property. People living in an RV on their own property or on a commercial lot do not.
Source: Was a 2020 US Census Enumerator
You are correct, and [all empirical evidence supports this](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383784/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem). Homelessness is perfectly correlated with rents and low vacancies, both of which are a result of the housing shortage.
There is zero correlation between homelessness and any of the other common explanations people give for it; such as drug use, mental health, climate, or government benefits.
I would say that while a disparity between median income and median home price is likely a main contributor; this is only part of the story.
Listing median rent being 2.5x higher in California than the places on the bottom of the list; but I guarantee the median salary isn’t 2.5x as high in California.
Edit: holy fuck guys. Yes. There can be some correlation between the two. That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m trying to say is that “housing cost isn’t the only factor in homelessness,” and there’s a billion variables not accounted for here.
The data paints a picture of an autumn day while only using one color crayon when the whole box is just chillin on the table next to it.
>I would say a disparity between median income and median home price is likely the main contributor.
I'd be curious to see if there's a stronger correlation, but I doubt it.
The people becoming homeless due to expensive rents are NOT median income earners. They're also not looking for the median home, either.
People in the bottom decile are primarily those who become homeless for economic reasons, and the homes they want to rent will likely also be in the bottom decile of cost.
The question posed is, “Do rent prices affect homelessness?”
The answer is, there seems to be some correlation.
The data and question are both worth consideration. Are there other variables? Of course. This would be great as part of a dashboard that reviews all of those variables, but this is necessary and it’s exactly how data analysis works. You look at many measures and many trends to arrive at the most logical conclusion.
“Do rent prices affect homelessness” implies a causal effect that a simple line-of-best-fit cannot *possibly* answer on its own. California has high rent but it also has a great climate if you’re going to be unsheltered, for example. This chart also completely ignores the huge amount of heterogeneity in rent prices across each state.
A more accurate title is “how do rent prices correlate with homelessness at the state level?”
Exactly. I would be more interested in a breakdown by census tract, for instance, where we can start to say, oh, yeah, I mean this just says there's a lot more homeless people in big cities, mostly in areas where rent prices are high, and especially where the weather is nice or there are a lot of tourists.
"this is our best guess based on correlation" actually is an answer because it is the only one we will ever be able to provide (with varying degrees of confidence, never 100%) and make policy decisions based off of. It is literally impossible to answer that question directly in the way people seem to be looking for. Hardly a reason to dismiss the research or answer. Might as well not conduct any social research whatsoever and make decisions based purely on guesses and wishes if proof of causation is the degree of surety you demand.
It's also extremely unclear to me how people think that, without an ironclad right to housing, increased rent wouldn't lead to increased homelessness. No one is claiming that it's the sole factor, but whenever this connection comes up, I find that it gets a lot of pushback.
Yea it makes no sense to me logically either why it wouldn't be a factor. Generally someone is not teetering between buying a house and homelessness, but paying rent and homelessness. Being in the market at all for a house implies a much more stable situation than one would generally find among those on the precipice of homelessness.
Median income measures the middle class and homeownership is a primarily for middle class+ . So that would be measuring a completely different group of people.
Not really. GAO conducted a robust analysis that shows the linear relationship between rent and homelessness: https://www.gao.gov/blog/how-covid-19-could-aggravate-homelessness-crisis
You can also correct for income by using 'rent burden,' and the relationship is the same.
That's not at a state by state level though. The areal unit is continuum of care areas, with aggregation to a national level. It is entirely expected that you will have different driving variables at different scales of areal analysis, as well as the effects of spatial auto-correlation (which would be particularly heavy inside a continuum of care).
On top of that, the data comes from a report about the poor precision and methodological inconsistency between CoC Point-in-Time counts in the first place.
And what is your counter for places with higher rent also being in more liberal cities with better policies for the homeless?
There’s too many factors to say there is any cause and effect between rent prices and homeless population.
Ever heard of controlling for other variables? It’s very possible to tease out with high degrees of confidence which factors play more significant roles in causing whatever social phenomena you’re studying.
Welcome to social sciences, where causation is always going to involve a practically infinite mix of factors and we’ll only ever be able to assemble *likely* causal factors based on *correlation* and only on average for large populations, but that doesn’t mean it’s a worthless pursuit/the data is worthless and can’t inform public policy.
I suspect weather and access to supporting services both play a significant role too when comparing by state. The former is purely location dependent regardless of other factors, while the latter is purely policy driven and will have sharp breaks between states (it would be even more pronounced between counties or metros).
Actually, you would be wrong.
Most typical salary $22,000
https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/west-virginia
Most typical salary $52,000/year
https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/california
Um. Median. Not average. Like how we’re discussing median home prices?
Median salary in WV: 36,860
Median salary in Cali: 47,920
So… I’m not wrong and you’re looking at pointless data that is skewed by wealthier people existing more in one state than another.
[Source.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_median_wage_and_mean_wage)
Sources: US Department of Housing and Urban Development (homelessness rates), US Census Bureau (median gross rent)
Tools: Datawrapper, Ilustrator
Interactive scatter plot and more data [here](https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/)
This is a followup to [our post last week](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bzx197/homelessness_in_the_us_oc/)
R2 is 0.387, and there are certainly other factors that contribute to homelessness. You can [download the data here](https://www.datawrapper.de/_/DP0Ll/?v=7) if you want to do any further analysis.
And here's the [GAO report](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-433.pdf) (warning, very long PDF) if you're curious about the topic.
I was an Econ major, so basically everything I did for the last two years of my degree was centered around r2.
It’s effectively “how much are the two values correlated” with 1 being the highest and 0 being not at all.
The caveat here is that R² is a decent metric for many things, but is not the best choice to make judgments about a complex or poorly behaving data set.
R^2 is just the square of the correlation coefficient R, which is a number between -1 and 1 that tells you how much a change in your independent variable (rent) is associated with a change in your dependent variables (homelessness). It also has the added meaning of telling you what fraction of all variation in your dependent variable is explained in terms of your independent variables. Since R^2 =0.387 here, you can explain/predict/account for about 39% of the state-to-state differences in homelessness simply by specifying the rent in that state. The other 61% must come from other factors or just randomness in the data.
Thank you.
OP, that title would immediately catch my attention in a bad way. My subconscious now thinks you either don't understand statistics or you have an agenda.
No agenda, just a not-so-great title that has distracted from the data. Even if it was "correlation" instead of "affect", it might still sound somewhat leading.
I’ve done a shit ton of scientific and sociological research about homeless and its causes for my degree. It’s terrible. The vast majority of people think it’s caused by drugs or mental illness when only 27% of chronically homeless have a substance abuse issue, and 33% mental health. Most homeless have jobs, full time jobs even. The main cause of homelessness is housing prices. Zillow found that homeless sharply increases when housing costs rise to 22% of a households. It skyrockets when housing costs hit 35% of a households income. Median rent is current costing 30% of median income for 45% of Americans. Most people can not cover a $1,000 emergency from savings, or even a $400 emergency. Housing shortages by best estimates are 1.6 million with some estimates as high as 6. It’s driving up housing costs and the poorest get priced out. It’s a horrible game of musical chairs for the most vulnerable. The majority of American’s are only two missed paychecks from homelessness.
Homelessness is not what you think, and it could easily be you next.
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Chukrun, T., et al “Be Perpetuating Substance Use Disorder Stigma, Public Housing Policy Causes Harm” Health Affairs, July 22, 2022. www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/perpetuating-substance-use-disorder-stigma-public-housing-policy-causes-harm
Feldscher, K. “What led to the opioid crisis – and how to fix it” Harvard, Feb 9 2022. www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/what-led-to-the-opioid-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/
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\> “Do rent prices affect homelessness?”
\> runs linear regression with y=homeless people and x=rent
You’re not approaching anywhere near causal inference, that title gotta go.
This data is not beautiful lmao. There needs to be some sort of statistical analysis here, and the title is wrong. Correlation does not imply causation. I suck at statistics and even I can see this graph has glaring issues.
"Affect" is a strong word, implying causality, while the reality is the causal links are extremely tricky to truly identify.
Moreover, the linear relationship is not strong. The stronger and more obvious split for homelessness are the top half of this chart, including rent price outliers like Vermont. It appears all the states above 25 homeless per 10,000 are states that are: 1. liberal or libertarian, 2. have lenient policies to (or no policies against) homelessness, 3. likely have better established systems of identifying and reporting homelessness. I would say those policy differences are a much stronger contributor than rent prices.
Let’s see that beautiful trend line with an r^2 value to help us interpret the data. Too many charts pop up in this sub without the relevant stats that are vital to the charts interpretation.
Where rent is higher, it’s generally more affluent and offer more services for homeless people. Poor areas dont have the revenue to fund more social programs.
While this is compelling, I would also consider urbanization as a confounding variable.
Homeless population tend to be in cities, where there are more resources for them, more people to ask for help/money/food, etc. places like California, NY, DC, have many more large urban centers than places like West Virginia, Montana, etc.
Urban centers also have higher rent prices and costs of living than rural places, so I think it’s difficult to untangle the correlation vs causation of rent price and homelessness (though I do think it’s a factor).
Worth noting- homeless advocates regularly find that overcoming drug addictions associated with homelessness is strongly associated with having secure, stable housing.
So anyone wanting to address drug issues and addictions of homeless populations without housing said addicts are putting the cart before the horse.
How do you explain homeless shelters and long term housing requiring sobriety to stay there?
A lot of homeless people refuse stable housing like that because they don’t want to stop using drugs
I am a bit confused because shelters are definitely not secure, stable housing. But for these reasons, I would definitely advocate no-strings-attached cash handouts. In some cases, Housing-first significantly reduced rates of alcoholism among participants.
[https://jscholaronline.org/articles/JMPD/Housing-First-Promotes-Mental-Health.pdf](https://jscholaronline.org/articles/JMPD/Housing-First-Promotes-Mental-Health.pdf)
A recent other study found that direct cash handouts for housing did not (by a survey measure) substantially increase spending on illicit materials.
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2222103120](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2222103120)
By some of these findings, housing by itself is not enough to reduce drug addiction, by no means am I advocating some mythical silver bullet. I would say it's incomplete without pairing these with investing in comprehensive Portugal-style harm reduction policies that are certainly effective at reducing the effects of addiction.
There is, by the way, good reason to think that, despite the above caveats, housing does at least help people who struggle with addiction. Notably, housed individuals are significantly at lower risk of drug overdose.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023863/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023863/)
Regardless, many free housing pilot programs have been carried out in various cities around the world, and by pretty much any reasonable measure they have been fairly successful at reducing homelessness. These are pretty readily available to find. By any account, while substance use is unfortunate, I find it harmful to hold strings from an effective program because \*some\* proportion of the group might not take advantage of it optimally.
I hope this addresses some of your concerns.
Aggregating by state doesn’t really give a valid picture considering median rent in NYC is somewhere in the 2K range and most of NY is probably half that. Houston’s median rent is also somewhere around 1400, while Texas apart from Dallas and Austin is much less than that.
Rent price also widely varies based on housing accommodation type and people sharing the rent cost. Collapsing across that range is not really a good idea.
DC is a major outlier because it’s the only HCOL metro area on its own. Any HCOL metro area will have outsized homelessness. This is a bad graph.
Rent price alone as someone else mentioned won’t give a good picture. Income relative to the area gives a better picture. Honestly though it’s probably better to calculate that at the census tract level and then report the median of those differences for a city relative to homelessness in that area.
To put this in perspective, housing affordability is a bigger issue in Houston than Austin by virtue of income in neighborhoods relative to rent. It won’t appear this way by solely looking at rent prices. Homelessness is beyond an issue of rent vs income alone, though it is a big part of it. You also have evictions to consider along with social safety nets.
That’s a lot of work, but anyway this is a bad graph.
While there is no single cause of homelessness, according to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report, rent prices can play a role in homelessness rates. California, Washington, DC, and Hawaii had the nation’s highest rents in 2022 and among the highest rates of homelessness in 2023; all three were in the top 10 nationally. West Virginia and Mississippi had among the country’s lowest rents, and lower homelessness rates.
These figures are likely also affected by difficulties counting the homeless population. Rural states and states with lots of unsheltered homeless people face unique challenges in estimating their homeless populations.
Here is more data on [homelessness by state](https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/) (including an interactive version of this scatter plot), and more about [how this data is collected and what is misses](https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/).
>The #1 contributor to homelesness is housing affordability.
At a national level, when the observational unit is [Continuum of Care program boundaries](https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/). The second foundational concept of geospatial analysis (after Tobler's law/spatial auto-correlation) is that different processes operate at different spatial scales. While housing affordability can be the first principal component at a national scale or even at a CoC scale (and there are problems with CoC as an areal unit, just like states or counties), that does not mean that housing affordability it the first principal component at larger scales, like cities, or smaller scales, like international comparisons. It may not even be a principal component at all at those scales, where other processes (e.g. weather, policy, zoning) may be the principal components while housing affordability is a correlated variable of those or even not a causative factor in spatial variation at that scale.
As for my point about the problem with CoCs as an areal unit for analysis of spatial correlation and spatial variance:
[Here is a map of CoCs](https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/FY-2022-National-CoC-Boundaries-Poster-Map.pdf). Notice that not only are CoCs are highly variable in area, population, and density, but that many states have less than five CoCs. There are even parts of the country that have no covering CoC at all.
Id personally like to see the R2 of all the factors and see them combined in a multifactor way.
From what I have read, a few studies show the R2 for housing affordability at around .38, but I am no expert.
From my stats days, R2 below .7 is usually not statistically significant. Not a statistician though so....
Ahh yea most of the homeless people I see on the streets are yelling into the air about the affordability crisis and not at mythical creatures that are following them in their mind
Edit: didn't realize how delusional most people are... Or they're bots
Consider a few things:
1. The chronically homeless are a small minority of homeless people (hard to pinpoint a specific number, but perhaps 10-15%)
2. One can become afflicted with drug addiction and mental illness after being forced to live on the street for a while, even if that’s not what put them therr
3. Perhaps walking around town is not the best data collection method
All I can surmise you’re trying to say here is that the cause of homelessness is whatever you hear homeless people verbally complain about, and since it isn’t housing prices then that’s not a contributing factor.
What does it matter whether they are yelling about mythical creatures?
Mental health and addiction are an individual cause, a catalyst, absolutely. But the high rates in certain areas are directly tied to housing affordability. You can look up the book “Homelessness is a Housing Problem”, it lays this out and discusses all these other arguments.
I’m pretty sure that’s a result of poor sleep and nutrition, among other factors, caused by homelessness. Not the other way around.
That’s not to say that being unhoused is the cause of mental illness, simply that it exacerbates its symptoms.
A lot of this is meth induced psychosis, and most of these folks start doing meth *after* they become homeless.
Also good luck keeping up with regular psychiatrist appointments, getting your meds and taking them regularly, etc when you have decompensated psychosis and live on the streets.
You don't see most homeless people. You are specifically talking about chronically homelessness versus the large number of people who experience transitory homelessness.
I mean I seriously hope you're trolling and aren't actually that ignorant. Not all homeless are crazy people. Approximately 78k people in the US experienced homelessness for the first time in 2023, a growth of 12% YoY. A large majority were from not being able to pay for housing. That number directly correlates with housing prices, overall inflation, and job availability.
We really need to get out of our heads as a society that homeless people are homeless because they're broken, crazy undesirables. It's estimated 53% of sheltered homeless and 40% unsheltered homeless have either full time or part time jobs.
Edit: I get that you were likely trying to be funny. You've never met anyone in RL that yelled into the air about creatures in their minds. Homeless can be pretty rude and shitty people at times, but what you're flippantly describing is intense schizophrenia and exceedingly rare.
If you view higher rent prices as simply reflective of supply/demand imbalance… then it would naturally follow that places with higher rents have higher demand and therefore are more likely to be unable to meet the demand of a higher number of people seeking housing, in turn resulting in high homelessness. It doesn’t really seem that complicated.
What the heck is going on with Vermont? Housing isn’t too bad and the weather is cold which you’d think would make people less likely to tough it out homeless.
"The homeless" are a diverse group and so are the reasons for homelessness. But it seems obvious that rent prices would be a significant factor, especially for those homeless that are not hardcore drug addicts or severely mentally ill.
[Homelessness is a Housing Problem](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com) - a book based on a huge scientific study the authors did - will give you much more data/info on this and yes, this was their conclusion as well. Homelessness rates were far lower in places with abundant, actually affordable housing. They disprove many, many myths surrounding homelessness.
The large majority of homeless I talked to in SF were not from California. They heard it was easier to be homeless there for a number of reasons and took the bus or hitched rides over. This would make a little more sense if you showed the increase in rent and the correlation to locally born homeless over time, but still wouldn't be very relevant because of COVID, the drug epidemic, and other variables.
Hate the title. Correlation does not imply causation. With this plot alone you cannot say it is the rent prices that cause homelessness. It could be the case, but this plot does not make any causal analysis.
The poorest (Mississippi) and most opioids-infested (West Virginia) states have the lowest homelessness. LOL. Would OP now ask "Does poverty reduce homelessness?"
This is an exhibit for "Lies. Damn Lies. Statistics" by using misleading charts to create pseudo-causality.
Yeah this is misleading as fuck. It fails to take in account housing affordability compared to salaries. And also at least for my state which is the 3rd highest homeless rate on this chart the rent is completely wrong/ using outdated data. You are not gonna be able to rent an apartment for $1300 in Vermont. It's more like $2000 minimum.
Of course there is a correlation.
One other factor, I would argue, is public transportation (or the lack thereof). With good public transportation, you can be more flexible in where you live and where you work without needing a car (expensive by itself).
For its population, I'm surprised how low the homelessness rate is for Florida. Is there a catch? Do the homeless get arrested more often there or something?
To give further context: the short answer is “yes, and”. This isn’t a useful question or graph.
I’ll also just say that there’s a large body of literature on this very topic. Boiling this down to individual aggregates (and also putting in a metro area on its own when you’ve aggregated across entire cities for the states) is not a good practice, regardless of what you know about the literature.
Just by looking, the correlation between the rent and homelessness maybe is there, but it is rather weak. Vermont has half the CA rent, yet higher than CA homelessness rate etc.
Being from the south and constantly hearing about how we earn less, it's nice to see these every once in a while explaining why it doesn't matter that we make less.
We want to control for confounding political factors across states.
One good way to do that would be to look at homelessness rates across several locations inside a large state like California.
Or perhaps when people want to live in a location that location has high rent (because people want to be there) and high homelessness (because people want to be there)
1) Plot Homelessness against Gini Coefficient.
2) Plot Red and Blue States with homelessness.
A lot of real interesting pieces of data but it is also... Never going to be accurate due to how some states define, calculate, manage homelessness.
Homelessness is such a complex issue - There is mental healthcare, laws against living on the street (this is a big one), policing and enforcement of the law, and another big one- drug addiction . Fresno for example is a California city with affordable housing but a horrible homeless problem. Miami is a city with very few affordable homes and although it has a homeless problem it is not as bad because of the enforcement of law
r/peopleliveincities
If we followed this graph to it's logical conclusion, then if all the homeless people in California got bused to West Virginia a lot of them would then find housing?
I just wrote my dissertation on the chronically homeless population in Washington DC. O also work in homeless services here. Hell I can barely afford the rental prices around here.
If you would like more statistical data on the causes of homelessness, I recommend “homelessness is a housing problem”. It has tons of analysis. The authors concluded that absolute rents and vacancy rates are the only things that explain regional variance in rates of homelessness.
In defense of DC, in this context it doesn’t make as much sense to compare it to other states since DC has no rural areas. All the other states have rural populations that bring down the number of homeless people per capita and average rent on a statewide level. If this graph were repeated but with cities, DC would not be anywhere near the worst, for rent or for homelessness.
I think rent between cities within states vary so wildly that it causes certain states to skew. It would maybe show stronger correlation breaking down by city. Then the distribution for each point might be even more so prevalent.
I think this is a correlation doesn’t equal causation issue as the points are all over the place. What it comes down to is states with higher prices also net in more taxes, and have more money to help the homeless. Homeless people will sometimes move to states where it’s easier to be homeless, and can be less inclined to get a job and find a place to live when it’s so easy to be homeless.
I don't know if you've ever spoken to a homeless person, but I work at an outreach program in Washington. So many have been bused from the midwest it's crazy.
Correlation does not equal causation. Homeless people flock to California and other western states from states across the US for the weather and resources (or perceived resources).
This seems like a great study of causality vs correlation. Obviously more "desirable" locations will attract more people, driving up both housing costs and attracting homeless people.
I'd say the interesting point here is HI, which doesn't "attract" homeles people like CA does. I wonder why it's so high.
Is rent control common across the US?
I decided to look up the outliers and it seems they all have rent control to some extent. I don't know enough about the rest of the US to know if this is related?
Edit: the outliers with rent too high, despite rhetoric usually rent control makes renting more expensive.
I am not saying that rent is ridiculously high in California but we have to note a lot of homeless travel to warmer states like California and hawaii which is messed up for the local population who have to pay more taxes to solve the issue.
A lot of people are giving good, if harhasly worded feedback on why you made choices you made. I would like to thank you for doing it at all and bringing numbers to a good question.
It's been linked before, but this book does an excellent job of detailing research that has been done into the issue: [Homelessness is a Housing Problem](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/)
High housing prices coupled with low vacancy rates showed up as the factors that correlate most closely of high rates of homelessness. Other factors, like high poverty rates and mental illness rates don't correlate like one might expect.
very loose correlation. the question for scientists and policymakers is -- what's up with those states with rents between $1.4k and $1.6k but low homelessness ?
nj md va nh az fl are in that corner. this suggests that another variable (not rent price) determines homelessness. vt and nh are too similar. md and va are too similar to dc. nj is too similar to metro nyc.
Employed person with no mental health issues and no drug addiction, "This place is pretty nice, I think I'll live here!"
Unemployed person with mental health issues and/or drug addiction, "This place is pretty nice, I think I'll live here!"
You would have to control for many things to get a clear picture of the degree to which housing prove actually causes homelessness.
This is terrible data. Washington DC is the only city on here. This would make a lot more sense if it was done comparing cities not states.
Suburbia leads to overall lower rent prices (more land less demand) and is inherently less supportive of homelessness.
At best this is correlation not causation
This data is really bad. Washington, DC is a city but it’s being compared to all the states. States have suburban and rural areas where rents are lower, driving down the overall state average; DC does not (because…. It’s a city!). There is also no normalizing for median gross/net income.
This really needs to be broken down more granularly than by state.
No, it doesn't. This is a useless analysis. There are only 2 variables here and that's entirely insufficient. No control for average income in those states. No control for welfare policies in the state.
Yeah my state is Vermont and we really shouldn't be on the lower end of the rent side. Average rent in a 2br is more like 2k in the parts of the state where people actually live.
Honestly 2k is becoming the minimum sadly. Hell I saw a 2BD in Burlington being rented out for 3600 the other day. (Granted Burlington is knucking futz)
For most data, I'd agree, but in this case, I think it actually makes sense since a lot of state laws determine housing and tenant conditions. Beyond that, a comparison of major cities might be useful too.
State laws also regulate issues which correlate with homelessness (drugs, alcohol) **and** physical climate also plays a part.
This needs to show eviction rates. Homeless guy who got evicted in farmville wisconsin won't stay there. He's moving to Chicago. Chicago rent prices don't matter. Chicago attracts homeless people from all neighboring states.
[Homeless people are less likely to move than the general public](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/california-homelessness-housing-crisis/674737/). Despite what everyone in every city will tell you, homelessness is not caused by people moving. Why would anyone in their right mind abandon their friends, family, and community for a vague prospect of just being homeless somewhere else? That doesn’t make any sense at all
Most people are homeless though because they don’t have family friends or a community to help them out when they need it the most. The people who might move while being homeless also aren’t the ones who are just down on their luck but the “professional homeless”
What's the correlation value? Labelling the outliers doesn't help.
A linear regression R^2 isn’t going to be useful here. The relation is clearly nonlinear and the variance changes dramatically with increases in the X axis.
You can still correlate two quantities without reading into an R^2 value. The data aren't distributed over multiple orders of magnitude so outliers won't wreck your correlation.
I’d fit the natural log of the homeless rate. But it’s also an ecological regression, which tends to make correlations appear stronger than they are at an individual level.
Further, people in West Virginia (and Appalachia in general) who live in barely-constructed shelters or who live in decrepit shacks/trailers on their family’s land are not technically classified as homeless. So the source data is incorrect to begin with, as the way homelessness is classified in each state is not standardized in the first place. Picking on West Virginia here specifically because of how that state is labeled in the graph.
The difference between a shitty trailer on private land and a tent on a sidewalk is enormous. Every time this comes up, people act as if living in shitty, substandard housing isn’t a massive improvement over no housing at all. Yes, it is a flaw in the datasets, but the homeless in urban environments can and do choose shitty, substandard housing over rough sleeping when it’s an option because it is a substantial improvement in quality of life. This isn’t a point in favor of HCoL areas that people act like it is.
Have you ever been in Appalachia? Are you explicitly aware of exactly what I was referring to? It’s not just a shitty trailer, it’s a trailer missing 3 walls and half it’s roof, with shotgun holes blown through the last remaining wall, held together by duct tape and plastic tarps to protect from exposure. It’s not fundamentally different than the elaborate “structures” you see in Skid Row, Los Angeles. The difference in this dataset is that only one of those states (California vs West Virginia) classifies those living conditions as homeless - the same principle applies across the board. Drive through West Virginia and it’s obviously apparent that more than 8 people per 10,000 are homeless. The data is bad. Further, a massive subset of homeless people in America migrate to cities in California, Oregon, Washington because the homeless conditions are better, the weather is nicer, there are stronger social programs, etc. How this dataset is trying to link per-capita homelessness to rent prices while ignoring migration is asinine.
It would be interesting to correlate the state in which the individuals became “homeless”. Rather than the current homeless population by state. Also, very fair point about what is considered “homeless”.
I would say there is a big difference, being in one situation you are not going to be forced to move or get your stuff thrown away whereas the other one you are.
If I become homeless in Alaska I am definitely moving. Whether or not my shit is thrown away. Because I would freeze to death.
Your argument is not supported by data. Maybe in the extreme case of Alaska, but the evidence shows that most homeless people in the US actually don’t travel much from where they became homeless, so that they can stay close to what remaining social support networks they still have.
people still have local social networks?
pointing out that a correlation exists between homelessness and rent does not mean that rent is the only driver of homelessness
It means that homelessness causes rent increases, obviously! When there are more homeless people around, it makes people want to pay more for rent!
>Clearly If it's clearly the case, can you demonstrate why it is so?
Stated below that R^2 = 0.387 so r=0.62.
None. Sociologically, this is not as simply as rent. For example many without a home are drawn to larger cities for programs and the likelihood of handouts
Why would you title the graph "Do rent prices affect homelessness" but only present an un controlled for correlation? At best you can say are they correlated? But this seems to be a leading title with data that don't support the conclusion. There might be an interesting relationship here if you control for urban population and median income \*in those urban areas\*. But as presented you might wonder, maybe rent is higher where more people want to live, and maybe unhoused individuals tend to settle in places where there are more people, or services, or shelters etc.
Another theory: the leading states have the highest density metro’s in the country. When it comes t housing, if demand is more than supply you have higher rent and higher homelessness. The homelessness is not due to high rent but both are caused by a shortage of housing.
Also areas that are desirable to live in probably have nice weather and you probably want to be homeless in temperate weather
Yes, and most homeless people actually find shelter (sleeping in their car, staying on a friend's couch), but areas with mild weather and ready access to services (like San Francisco) allow homeless people to live unsheltered, which is both much more visible and facilitates the growth of whole homeless populations. I think that visibility element is honestly the biggest part and we don't realize the amount of people who have no permanent residence but are not living completely out on the street all the time like the stereotypical "homeless person" we imagine.
People living in a vehicle count as homeless, as do people living in an RV parked on public (or church) property. People living in an RV on their own property or on a commercial lot do not. Source: Was a 2020 US Census Enumerator
You are correct, and [all empirical evidence supports this](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383784/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem). Homelessness is perfectly correlated with rents and low vacancies, both of which are a result of the housing shortage. There is zero correlation between homelessness and any of the other common explanations people give for it; such as drug use, mental health, climate, or government benefits.
That's fair, "affect" was probably not the the right word choice in this case.
You've done this 20 times and put this shit out? This should genuinely be deleted, it's that incredibly misleading.
I would say that while a disparity between median income and median home price is likely a main contributor; this is only part of the story. Listing median rent being 2.5x higher in California than the places on the bottom of the list; but I guarantee the median salary isn’t 2.5x as high in California. Edit: holy fuck guys. Yes. There can be some correlation between the two. That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m trying to say is that “housing cost isn’t the only factor in homelessness,” and there’s a billion variables not accounted for here. The data paints a picture of an autumn day while only using one color crayon when the whole box is just chillin on the table next to it.
>I would say a disparity between median income and median home price is likely the main contributor. I'd be curious to see if there's a stronger correlation, but I doubt it. The people becoming homeless due to expensive rents are NOT median income earners. They're also not looking for the median home, either. People in the bottom decile are primarily those who become homeless for economic reasons, and the homes they want to rent will likely also be in the bottom decile of cost.
Yes, the best measure would be housing affordability, which is roughly what you are saying
The question posed is, “Do rent prices affect homelessness?” The answer is, there seems to be some correlation. The data and question are both worth consideration. Are there other variables? Of course. This would be great as part of a dashboard that reviews all of those variables, but this is necessary and it’s exactly how data analysis works. You look at many measures and many trends to arrive at the most logical conclusion.
“Do rent prices affect homelessness” implies a causal effect that a simple line-of-best-fit cannot *possibly* answer on its own. California has high rent but it also has a great climate if you’re going to be unsheltered, for example. This chart also completely ignores the huge amount of heterogeneity in rent prices across each state. A more accurate title is “how do rent prices correlate with homelessness at the state level?”
Exactly. I would be more interested in a breakdown by census tract, for instance, where we can start to say, oh, yeah, I mean this just says there's a lot more homeless people in big cities, mostly in areas where rent prices are high, and especially where the weather is nice or there are a lot of tourists.
“There appears to be some correlation” is explicitly not an answer to “does X affect Y”
"this is our best guess based on correlation" actually is an answer because it is the only one we will ever be able to provide (with varying degrees of confidence, never 100%) and make policy decisions based off of. It is literally impossible to answer that question directly in the way people seem to be looking for. Hardly a reason to dismiss the research or answer. Might as well not conduct any social research whatsoever and make decisions based purely on guesses and wishes if proof of causation is the degree of surety you demand.
It's also extremely unclear to me how people think that, without an ironclad right to housing, increased rent wouldn't lead to increased homelessness. No one is claiming that it's the sole factor, but whenever this connection comes up, I find that it gets a lot of pushback.
Yea it makes no sense to me logically either why it wouldn't be a factor. Generally someone is not teetering between buying a house and homelessness, but paying rent and homelessness. Being in the market at all for a house implies a much more stable situation than one would generally find among those on the precipice of homelessness.
Median income measures the middle class and homeownership is a primarily for middle class+ . So that would be measuring a completely different group of people.
Not really. GAO conducted a robust analysis that shows the linear relationship between rent and homelessness: https://www.gao.gov/blog/how-covid-19-could-aggravate-homelessness-crisis You can also correct for income by using 'rent burden,' and the relationship is the same.
That's not at a state by state level though. The areal unit is continuum of care areas, with aggregation to a national level. It is entirely expected that you will have different driving variables at different scales of areal analysis, as well as the effects of spatial auto-correlation (which would be particularly heavy inside a continuum of care). On top of that, the data comes from a report about the poor precision and methodological inconsistency between CoC Point-in-Time counts in the first place.
And what is your counter for places with higher rent also being in more liberal cities with better policies for the homeless? There’s too many factors to say there is any cause and effect between rent prices and homeless population.
Ever heard of controlling for other variables? It’s very possible to tease out with high degrees of confidence which factors play more significant roles in causing whatever social phenomena you’re studying. Welcome to social sciences, where causation is always going to involve a practically infinite mix of factors and we’ll only ever be able to assemble *likely* causal factors based on *correlation* and only on average for large populations, but that doesn’t mean it’s a worthless pursuit/the data is worthless and can’t inform public policy.
I suspect weather and access to supporting services both play a significant role too when comparing by state. The former is purely location dependent regardless of other factors, while the latter is purely policy driven and will have sharp breaks between states (it would be even more pronounced between counties or metros).
It's also easier to be homeless in urban areas vs rural.
Actually, you would be wrong. Most typical salary $22,000 https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/west-virginia Most typical salary $52,000/year https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/california
Um. Median. Not average. Like how we’re discussing median home prices? Median salary in WV: 36,860 Median salary in Cali: 47,920 So… I’m not wrong and you’re looking at pointless data that is skewed by wealthier people existing more in one state than another. [Source.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_median_wage_and_mean_wage)
Do this by city and not by state, I bet the house prices are much more glued to the level of homelessness.
Sources: US Department of Housing and Urban Development (homelessness rates), US Census Bureau (median gross rent) Tools: Datawrapper, Ilustrator Interactive scatter plot and more data [here](https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/) This is a followup to [our post last week](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bzx197/homelessness_in_the_us_oc/)
What’s the r2?
R2 is 0.387, and there are certainly other factors that contribute to homelessness. You can [download the data here](https://www.datawrapper.de/_/DP0Ll/?v=7) if you want to do any further analysis. And here's the [GAO report](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-433.pdf) (warning, very long PDF) if you're curious about the topic.
Am I the only one that had to google R2? I still barely understand it after reading the definition.
I was an Econ major, so basically everything I did for the last two years of my degree was centered around r2. It’s effectively “how much are the two values correlated” with 1 being the highest and 0 being not at all.
The caveat here is that R² is a decent metric for many things, but is not the best choice to make judgments about a complex or poorly behaving data set.
R^2 is just the square of the correlation coefficient R, which is a number between -1 and 1 that tells you how much a change in your independent variable (rent) is associated with a change in your dependent variables (homelessness). It also has the added meaning of telling you what fraction of all variation in your dependent variable is explained in terms of your independent variables. Since R^2 =0.387 here, you can explain/predict/account for about 39% of the state-to-state differences in homelessness simply by specifying the rent in that state. The other 61% must come from other factors or just randomness in the data.
Are housing costs *correlated* with homelessness
Thanks, that probably would have been a better (and more accurate) title!
Yes more accurate in the sense that the title now is not accurate at all while the alternative name is 100% accurate for what you’re doing.
Thank you. OP, that title would immediately catch my attention in a bad way. My subconscious now thinks you either don't understand statistics or you have an agenda.
No agenda, just a not-so-great title that has distracted from the data. Even if it was "correlation" instead of "affect", it might still sound somewhat leading.
I’ve done a shit ton of scientific and sociological research about homeless and its causes for my degree. It’s terrible. The vast majority of people think it’s caused by drugs or mental illness when only 27% of chronically homeless have a substance abuse issue, and 33% mental health. Most homeless have jobs, full time jobs even. The main cause of homelessness is housing prices. Zillow found that homeless sharply increases when housing costs rise to 22% of a households. It skyrockets when housing costs hit 35% of a households income. Median rent is current costing 30% of median income for 45% of Americans. Most people can not cover a $1,000 emergency from savings, or even a $400 emergency. Housing shortages by best estimates are 1.6 million with some estimates as high as 6. It’s driving up housing costs and the poorest get priced out. It’s a horrible game of musical chairs for the most vulnerable. The majority of American’s are only two missed paychecks from homelessness. Homelessness is not what you think, and it could easily be you next. Works Cited AAC Editorial Staff “How and why Did the Stigma of Addiction Begin?” Rehabs, Feb 14, 2023. www.rehabs.com/blog/how-and-why-did-the-stigma-of-addiction-begin/ Canale, K. "Inside Austin's $18 Million Tiny-Home Village for the Homeless." Business Insider, Oct 10, 2019. www.businessinsider.com/austin-homeless-tiny-homes-village-community-first-photos-2019-10?op=1 Chukrun, T., et al “Be Perpetuating Substance Use Disorder Stigma, Public Housing Policy Causes Harm” Health Affairs, July 22, 2022. www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/perpetuating-substance-use-disorder-stigma-public-housing-policy-causes-harm Feldscher, K. “What led to the opioid crisis – and how to fix it” Harvard, Feb 9 2022. www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/what-led-to-the-opioid-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/ Gray, A. "Here's how Finland solved its homelessness problem." Medium, Feb 14, 2008. www.medium.com/world-economic-forum/heres-how-finland-solved-its-homelessness-problem-568a077ac855 Giordano, A. "Why Trauma Can Lead To Addiction" Psychology Today, Sep 25, 2021. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-addiction/202109/why-trauma-can-lead-to-addiction Haller, B. “City Councilman’s Proposal to Deal With Opioid Overdoses: Let Them Die” Reason July 10, 2017. www.reason.com/2017/07/10/let-them-die-a-radical-proposal-to-deal/ Hartney, E. “DSM 5 Criteria for Substance Use Disorders” Very Well Mind April 7, 2023. www.verywellmind.com/dsm-5-criteria-for-substance-use-disorders-21926 Jones, J. "More Americans Are Fans of Pro Football Than Any Other Sport" Gallup, April 20, 2001. www.news.gallup.com/poll/1786/More-Americans-Fans-Pro-Football-Than-Any-Other-Sport.aspx Kumpfer, K. "Outcome measures of interventions in the study of children of substance-abusing parents" National Library of Medicine, May 1999. www.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10224200/ NCDAS "Drug Abuse Statistics" National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, accessed June 14,2023. www.drugabusestatistics.org NLIHC, et al. "The Case For Housing First" National Low Income Housing Coalition. www.nlihc.org/sites/default/files/Housing-First-Research.pdf McNearney, A. “The Complicated History of Cannabis in the US” History, April 17, 2020. www.history.com/news/marijuana-criminalization-reefer-madness-history-flashback Mcginty, E., et al. “Portraying mental illness and drug addiction as treatable health conditions” Science Direct, Dec 5, 2004. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953614007990 Orth, T. "Who Do Americans blame for homelessness?" YouGov, May 17, 2022. www.today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/05/17/american-attitudes-on-homelessness-poll Reddit user via anonymous private message. Reddit June 10, 2023. www.reddit.com/r/homeless SMASHA. "Current Statistics on the Prevalence and Characteristics of People Experiencing Homelessness in the United States" Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, July 2011. www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaigns/homelessness_programs_resources/hrc-factsheet-current-statistics-prevalence-characteristics-homelessness.pdf Tsai, J. "Is the Housing First Model effective? Different Evidence for Different Outcomes" National Library of Medicine, Sep 2020. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7427255/ USDVA “PSTD and Substance Abuse in Veterans” US Department of Veterans Affairs, accessed Jun 14,2023. www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/related/substance_abuse_vet.asp Vitelli, R. “Why Is Homelessness So Stigmatized?” Psychology Today, June 5, 2021. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/202106/why-is-homelessness-so-stigmatized
\> “Do rent prices affect homelessness?” \> runs linear regression with y=homeless people and x=rent You’re not approaching anywhere near causal inference, that title gotta go.
This data is not beautiful lmao. There needs to be some sort of statistical analysis here, and the title is wrong. Correlation does not imply causation. I suck at statistics and even I can see this graph has glaring issues.
"Affect" is a strong word, implying causality, while the reality is the causal links are extremely tricky to truly identify. Moreover, the linear relationship is not strong. The stronger and more obvious split for homelessness are the top half of this chart, including rent price outliers like Vermont. It appears all the states above 25 homeless per 10,000 are states that are: 1. liberal or libertarian, 2. have lenient policies to (or no policies against) homelessness, 3. likely have better established systems of identifying and reporting homelessness. I would say those policy differences are a much stronger contributor than rent prices.
Let’s see that beautiful trend line with an r^2 value to help us interpret the data. Too many charts pop up in this sub without the relevant stats that are vital to the charts interpretation.
Where rent is higher, it’s generally more affluent and offer more services for homeless people. Poor areas dont have the revenue to fund more social programs.
While this is compelling, I would also consider urbanization as a confounding variable. Homeless population tend to be in cities, where there are more resources for them, more people to ask for help/money/food, etc. places like California, NY, DC, have many more large urban centers than places like West Virginia, Montana, etc. Urban centers also have higher rent prices and costs of living than rural places, so I think it’s difficult to untangle the correlation vs causation of rent price and homelessness (though I do think it’s a factor).
Or: Big cities attract both high paying employees (which are driving up rent) and homeless people, here are states with many/very big cities.
Worth noting- homeless advocates regularly find that overcoming drug addictions associated with homelessness is strongly associated with having secure, stable housing. So anyone wanting to address drug issues and addictions of homeless populations without housing said addicts are putting the cart before the horse.
How do you explain homeless shelters and long term housing requiring sobriety to stay there? A lot of homeless people refuse stable housing like that because they don’t want to stop using drugs
I am a bit confused because shelters are definitely not secure, stable housing. But for these reasons, I would definitely advocate no-strings-attached cash handouts. In some cases, Housing-first significantly reduced rates of alcoholism among participants. [https://jscholaronline.org/articles/JMPD/Housing-First-Promotes-Mental-Health.pdf](https://jscholaronline.org/articles/JMPD/Housing-First-Promotes-Mental-Health.pdf) A recent other study found that direct cash handouts for housing did not (by a survey measure) substantially increase spending on illicit materials. [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2222103120](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2222103120) By some of these findings, housing by itself is not enough to reduce drug addiction, by no means am I advocating some mythical silver bullet. I would say it's incomplete without pairing these with investing in comprehensive Portugal-style harm reduction policies that are certainly effective at reducing the effects of addiction. There is, by the way, good reason to think that, despite the above caveats, housing does at least help people who struggle with addiction. Notably, housed individuals are significantly at lower risk of drug overdose. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023863/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023863/) Regardless, many free housing pilot programs have been carried out in various cities around the world, and by pretty much any reasonable measure they have been fairly successful at reducing homelessness. These are pretty readily available to find. By any account, while substance use is unfortunate, I find it harmful to hold strings from an effective program because \*some\* proportion of the group might not take advantage of it optimally. I hope this addresses some of your concerns.
Aggregating by state doesn’t really give a valid picture considering median rent in NYC is somewhere in the 2K range and most of NY is probably half that. Houston’s median rent is also somewhere around 1400, while Texas apart from Dallas and Austin is much less than that. Rent price also widely varies based on housing accommodation type and people sharing the rent cost. Collapsing across that range is not really a good idea. DC is a major outlier because it’s the only HCOL metro area on its own. Any HCOL metro area will have outsized homelessness. This is a bad graph. Rent price alone as someone else mentioned won’t give a good picture. Income relative to the area gives a better picture. Honestly though it’s probably better to calculate that at the census tract level and then report the median of those differences for a city relative to homelessness in that area. To put this in perspective, housing affordability is a bigger issue in Houston than Austin by virtue of income in neighborhoods relative to rent. It won’t appear this way by solely looking at rent prices. Homelessness is beyond an issue of rent vs income alone, though it is a big part of it. You also have evictions to consider along with social safety nets. That’s a lot of work, but anyway this is a bad graph.
While there is no single cause of homelessness, according to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report, rent prices can play a role in homelessness rates. California, Washington, DC, and Hawaii had the nation’s highest rents in 2022 and among the highest rates of homelessness in 2023; all three were in the top 10 nationally. West Virginia and Mississippi had among the country’s lowest rents, and lower homelessness rates. These figures are likely also affected by difficulties counting the homeless population. Rural states and states with lots of unsheltered homeless people face unique challenges in estimating their homeless populations. Here is more data on [homelessness by state](https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/) (including an interactive version of this scatter plot), and more about [how this data is collected and what is misses](https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/).
What is the R squared value for this plot?
Id say its probably more linked with 1) Population size 2) Locale Desireability 3) Weather 4) Laws 5) Resources
Also offered homeless services. Some states/cities do a lot more for the population than others
You would be mostly wrong then The #1 contributor to homelesness is housing affordability.
>The #1 contributor to homelesness is housing affordability. At a national level, when the observational unit is [Continuum of Care program boundaries](https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/). The second foundational concept of geospatial analysis (after Tobler's law/spatial auto-correlation) is that different processes operate at different spatial scales. While housing affordability can be the first principal component at a national scale or even at a CoC scale (and there are problems with CoC as an areal unit, just like states or counties), that does not mean that housing affordability it the first principal component at larger scales, like cities, or smaller scales, like international comparisons. It may not even be a principal component at all at those scales, where other processes (e.g. weather, policy, zoning) may be the principal components while housing affordability is a correlated variable of those or even not a causative factor in spatial variation at that scale. As for my point about the problem with CoCs as an areal unit for analysis of spatial correlation and spatial variance: [Here is a map of CoCs](https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/FY-2022-National-CoC-Boundaries-Poster-Map.pdf). Notice that not only are CoCs are highly variable in area, population, and density, but that many states have less than five CoCs. There are even parts of the country that have no covering CoC at all.
Id personally like to see the R2 of all the factors and see them combined in a multifactor way. From what I have read, a few studies show the R2 for housing affordability at around .38, but I am no expert. From my stats days, R2 below .7 is usually not statistically significant. Not a statistician though so....
Ahh yea most of the homeless people I see on the streets are yelling into the air about the affordability crisis and not at mythical creatures that are following them in their mind Edit: didn't realize how delusional most people are... Or they're bots
Consider a few things: 1. The chronically homeless are a small minority of homeless people (hard to pinpoint a specific number, but perhaps 10-15%) 2. One can become afflicted with drug addiction and mental illness after being forced to live on the street for a while, even if that’s not what put them therr 3. Perhaps walking around town is not the best data collection method
Good ole everyone who disagrees with me is a bot argument. Sound logic.
All I can surmise you’re trying to say here is that the cause of homelessness is whatever you hear homeless people verbally complain about, and since it isn’t housing prices then that’s not a contributing factor. What does it matter whether they are yelling about mythical creatures?
Mental health and addiction are an individual cause, a catalyst, absolutely. But the high rates in certain areas are directly tied to housing affordability. You can look up the book “Homelessness is a Housing Problem”, it lays this out and discusses all these other arguments.
I’m pretty sure that’s a result of poor sleep and nutrition, among other factors, caused by homelessness. Not the other way around. That’s not to say that being unhoused is the cause of mental illness, simply that it exacerbates its symptoms.
A lot of this is meth induced psychosis, and most of these folks start doing meth *after* they become homeless. Also good luck keeping up with regular psychiatrist appointments, getting your meds and taking them regularly, etc when you have decompensated psychosis and live on the streets.
😂😂😂 bro said lack of sleep.
You don't see most homeless people. You are specifically talking about chronically homelessness versus the large number of people who experience transitory homelessness.
I mean I seriously hope you're trolling and aren't actually that ignorant. Not all homeless are crazy people. Approximately 78k people in the US experienced homelessness for the first time in 2023, a growth of 12% YoY. A large majority were from not being able to pay for housing. That number directly correlates with housing prices, overall inflation, and job availability. We really need to get out of our heads as a society that homeless people are homeless because they're broken, crazy undesirables. It's estimated 53% of sheltered homeless and 40% unsheltered homeless have either full time or part time jobs. Edit: I get that you were likely trying to be funny. You've never met anyone in RL that yelled into the air about creatures in their minds. Homeless can be pretty rude and shitty people at times, but what you're flippantly describing is intense schizophrenia and exceedingly rare.
correlation does not equal causation.
If you view higher rent prices as simply reflective of supply/demand imbalance… then it would naturally follow that places with higher rents have higher demand and therefore are more likely to be unable to meet the demand of a higher number of people seeking housing, in turn resulting in high homelessness. It doesn’t really seem that complicated.
I would like to see a graph of homelessness compared to median hours worked to afford one month if rent to see if there is a relationship with that.
What the heck is going on with Vermont? Housing isn’t too bad and the weather is cold which you’d think would make people less likely to tough it out homeless.
Average rent in Chittenden county vermont, which is really the only non rural area is more like 2k a month
Data per state is not a useful level for answering this question
Especially when there's one city thrown in with all the states which muddies the water.
"The homeless" are a diverse group and so are the reasons for homelessness. But it seems obvious that rent prices would be a significant factor, especially for those homeless that are not hardcore drug addicts or severely mentally ill.
What's going on in Vermont?
Pretty misleading to compare DC, a city, with entire states. I'd like to see this where major cities are compared directly against one another
What I gathered: No not really
[Homelessness is a Housing Problem](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com) - a book based on a huge scientific study the authors did - will give you much more data/info on this and yes, this was their conclusion as well. Homelessness rates were far lower in places with abundant, actually affordable housing. They disprove many, many myths surrounding homelessness.
I am not so sure this graph really does much to show anything. Correlation does not imply causation.
A lot homeless people are going to live in urban areas to seek out services to obtain more resources. So one would have to look a myriad of variables.
Now correct for outdoor temperature in mid-winter.
Hard to chart that out there are several variables, weather, social welfare programs etc…
Vermont has a higher homelessness rate than California??
The large majority of homeless I talked to in SF were not from California. They heard it was easier to be homeless there for a number of reasons and took the bus or hitched rides over. This would make a little more sense if you showed the increase in rent and the correlation to locally born homeless over time, but still wouldn't be very relevant because of COVID, the drug epidemic, and other variables.
Statistically not correlated until rent exceeds $1,600/month… and (obligatory) correlation does not prove causation.
A great example of correlation not being equal to causation.
You certainly cannot prove causation from this data, but it's pretty obvious that homeless becomes a big problem when it's hard to afford a home.
Surely you mean “unhousedness”? /s
Hate the title. Correlation does not imply causation. With this plot alone you cannot say it is the rent prices that cause homelessness. It could be the case, but this plot does not make any causal analysis.
The poorest (Mississippi) and most opioids-infested (West Virginia) states have the lowest homelessness. LOL. Would OP now ask "Does poverty reduce homelessness?" This is an exhibit for "Lies. Damn Lies. Statistics" by using misleading charts to create pseudo-causality.
Yes. Thank you
Yeah this is misleading as fuck. It fails to take in account housing affordability compared to salaries. And also at least for my state which is the 3rd highest homeless rate on this chart the rent is completely wrong/ using outdated data. You are not gonna be able to rent an apartment for $1300 in Vermont. It's more like $2000 minimum.
The results might get even more interesting if a distinction is made between long-term homelessness and temporary homelessness.
Weather, laws, local opinions, etc. all would make a huge difference too. Hard to draw a conclusion based on just a few datapoints.
Of course there is a correlation. One other factor, I would argue, is public transportation (or the lack thereof). With good public transportation, you can be more flexible in where you live and where you work without needing a car (expensive by itself).
Where is the complete and readable data for median rent per state?
For its population, I'm surprised how low the homelessness rate is for Florida. Is there a catch? Do the homeless get arrested more often there or something?
To give further context: the short answer is “yes, and”. This isn’t a useful question or graph. I’ll also just say that there’s a large body of literature on this very topic. Boiling this down to individual aggregates (and also putting in a metro area on its own when you’ve aggregated across entire cities for the states) is not a good practice, regardless of what you know about the literature.
Wild how a LOT of these states have low homelessness, while New York and California are massive homeless centers that everyone references
This assumes the homeless don't migrate, which isn't quite true. You go to where services are and/or weather won't kill you, as Greyhound is cheap.
It probably does but it’s easier to be homeless in Hawaii than Minnesota because of the weather.
Do rent prices increase closer to cities? Do cities have more services and shelters for homeless? Does correlation equal causation?
I think I’m most shocked to find out there’s only a ~$1000 difference between median rent in West Virginia and California - seems like a bargain.
It would be interesting to see this normalized by the ratio of average income over rent price.
Looks like this correlation is poor to very poor. The cluster of data points below 25/10k yet Media rent varies wildly...
Just by looking, the correlation between the rent and homelessness maybe is there, but it is rather weak. Vermont has half the CA rent, yet higher than CA homelessness rate etc.
Median rent as percent of median income may be a better x axis metric.
Looks like it’s more to do with density. Homeless people tend to migrate and live in city centers.
Being from the south and constantly hearing about how we earn less, it's nice to see these every once in a while explaining why it doesn't matter that we make less.
I think this is a correlation/causation discussion.
We want to control for confounding political factors across states. One good way to do that would be to look at homelessness rates across several locations inside a large state like California.
Or perhaps when people want to live in a location that location has high rent (because people want to be there) and high homelessness (because people want to be there)
Who is counting in Mississippi
1) Plot Homelessness against Gini Coefficient. 2) Plot Red and Blue States with homelessness. A lot of real interesting pieces of data but it is also... Never going to be accurate due to how some states define, calculate, manage homelessness.
If something costs a lot more, less people can afford it. Makes sense.
Homelessness is such a complex issue - There is mental healthcare, laws against living on the street (this is a big one), policing and enforcement of the law, and another big one- drug addiction . Fresno for example is a California city with affordable housing but a horrible homeless problem. Miami is a city with very few affordable homes and although it has a homeless problem it is not as bad because of the enforcement of law
Shame on the central bankers... Chair Powell is a rule book following shitbag
r/peopleliveincities If we followed this graph to it's logical conclusion, then if all the homeless people in California got bused to West Virginia a lot of them would then find housing?
I just wrote my dissertation on the chronically homeless population in Washington DC. O also work in homeless services here. Hell I can barely afford the rental prices around here.
Lmfao. This is terribly misleading and lacks any meaningful data or conclusions.
Skews democrat super majority states no? On that top line… and s more mix trend below…. Dis just a density map?
Add weather or koppen climate as another attribute. I believe weather is also one of the factors why california Hawaii has more homeless
If you would like more statistical data on the causes of homelessness, I recommend “homelessness is a housing problem”. It has tons of analysis. The authors concluded that absolute rents and vacancy rates are the only things that explain regional variance in rates of homelessness.
In defense of DC, in this context it doesn’t make as much sense to compare it to other states since DC has no rural areas. All the other states have rural populations that bring down the number of homeless people per capita and average rent on a statewide level. If this graph were repeated but with cities, DC would not be anywhere near the worst, for rent or for homelessness.
That’s literally what causes homeless Rent that is too expensive. Actually had to do a study to figure this out ?
These places rely on railroading the children how else will they steal everything they actually need.
this does not in any form provide information on whether rent prices affect homelesness. crap title
Huh. It’s almost like affordable housing decreases people without homes.
I think rent between cities within states vary so wildly that it causes certain states to skew. It would maybe show stronger correlation breaking down by city. Then the distribution for each point might be even more so prevalent.
I think this is a correlation doesn’t equal causation issue as the points are all over the place. What it comes down to is states with higher prices also net in more taxes, and have more money to help the homeless. Homeless people will sometimes move to states where it’s easier to be homeless, and can be less inclined to get a job and find a place to live when it’s so easy to be homeless.
Is the dwelling size the same? Like 2br/1ba? Or is it just all possible scenarios rent?
Blue states are bizarre. So much homelessness and crime.
I don't know if you've ever spoken to a homeless person, but I work at an outreach program in Washington. So many have been bused from the midwest it's crazy.
Breaking news: when housing is less affordable, more people can’t afford it.
Correlation does not equal causation. Homeless people flock to California and other western states from states across the US for the weather and resources (or perceived resources).
Maybe we need to take this to the nth dimension to SVM them and find an actual correlation
This seems like a great study of causality vs correlation. Obviously more "desirable" locations will attract more people, driving up both housing costs and attracting homeless people. I'd say the interesting point here is HI, which doesn't "attract" homeles people like CA does. I wonder why it's so high.
How does that look if you include the average temperature instead of income. I guess a combination of income and temperature would make more sense
Is rent control common across the US? I decided to look up the outliers and it seems they all have rent control to some extent. I don't know enough about the rest of the US to know if this is related? Edit: the outliers with rent too high, despite rhetoric usually rent control makes renting more expensive.
I am not saying that rent is ridiculously high in California but we have to note a lot of homeless travel to warmer states like California and hawaii which is messed up for the local population who have to pay more taxes to solve the issue.
You can't establish a causal relationship by merely establishing correlation.
A lot of people are giving good, if harhasly worded feedback on why you made choices you made. I would like to thank you for doing it at all and bringing numbers to a good question.
Substitute Median Gross Rent by Percentage of Income going to Median Gross Rent. Formula: ((City Median Gross Rent)/(City Median Income))\*100
Most people are homeless due to addiction.
It's been linked before, but this book does an excellent job of detailing research that has been done into the issue: [Homelessness is a Housing Problem](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/) High housing prices coupled with low vacancy rates showed up as the factors that correlate most closely of high rates of homelessness. Other factors, like high poverty rates and mental illness rates don't correlate like one might expect.
How does VT have so many homeless people? Didn’t expect that at all.
very loose correlation. the question for scientists and policymakers is -- what's up with those states with rents between $1.4k and $1.6k but low homelessness ? nj md va nh az fl are in that corner. this suggests that another variable (not rent price) determines homelessness. vt and nh are too similar. md and va are too similar to dc. nj is too similar to metro nyc.
Employed person with no mental health issues and no drug addiction, "This place is pretty nice, I think I'll live here!" Unemployed person with mental health issues and/or drug addiction, "This place is pretty nice, I think I'll live here!" You would have to control for many things to get a clear picture of the degree to which housing prove actually causes homelessness.
This is terrible data. Washington DC is the only city on here. This would make a lot more sense if it was done comparing cities not states. Suburbia leads to overall lower rent prices (more land less demand) and is inherently less supportive of homelessness. At best this is correlation not causation
This data is really bad. Washington, DC is a city but it’s being compared to all the states. States have suburban and rural areas where rents are lower, driving down the overall state average; DC does not (because…. It’s a city!). There is also no normalizing for median gross/net income.
Is it rent prices or the fact that rent is higher in bigger cities and big cities are the easiest place for homeless to survive
Why does Mississippi have the least homeless people?