Comment: Lack of housing supply is what's behind homelessness
By Fred Safstrom / For The Herald
The author of a recent letter to the editor disagreed with my comments on the causes of homelessness, stating “the only thing that leads to long-term homelessness is bad choices.”
Yes, individual choices do play a role, but I urge us all to look deeper. Housing Hope has walked alongside families experiencing homelessness for 35 years. The fact is that even when families do everything “right” there just isn’t enough housing that is available and affordable for low- or even some middle-income families. This systemic lack of housing options is what’s driving our local rise in homelessness, not personal choices.
Dr. Gregg Colburn, professor at the University of Washington, has led academic research examining why some cities have higher rates of homelessness than others. In his book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” he uses the analogy of musical chairs. Ten people race around nine chairs waiting for the music to stop. When it does, one ends up without a chair. If asked, that person may say they did not get a chair because they were not fast enough. But is that the root cause? Or is the root cause that there were not enough chairs for everyone? Now imagine substituting homes for chairs.
In Snohomish County, we do not have enough chairs (houses and apartments) for everyone, and we are especially short on chairs that work for people with low incomes and other barriers that make it hard to compete. And it is the “slowest” (those with disabilities or low incomes or perhaps having made “bad choices”) who end up without chairs (homeless).
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-lack-of-housing-supply-is-whats-behind-homelessness/
= new reply since forum marked as read
They're building $700,000 condos near me, but that doesn't even begin to help the people who can't even afford a small apartment.
"Bad" choices, my ass!..There's a LACK of choices for the working and middle class, i.e. the vast majority of us. 
