Tying housing costs to homelessness rates, researchers have identified inflection points:

🔸When rents in a community exceed about a third of the median income, homelessness escalates.

🔸“As the share of low-income households with severe rent burdens grows, so does their risk of homelessness,”
said Thomas Byrne of Boston College, an author of the study.

Gregg Colburn, a housing expert at the University of Washington, found that
Seattle and San Francisco, with soaring rents,
had homelessness rates four to five times as high as those in Cleveland or Detroit, where rents were lower.

California’s homelessness rate was more than five times as great as Mississippi’s.

“If we had scaled Housing First
— with fidelity to the evidence-based model
— we wouldn’t have had such a big problem,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/us/trump-housing-first.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share