They have homelessness in Europe, too

They have homelessness in Europe, too

5 min ago

We got a question in the mailbag thread about why high-cost European cities don’t have the same level of homelessness that we see in some of America’s most expensive cities.

This generated a wide-ranging discussion in the thread, but I didn’t see many people questioning the premise.

My experience of traveling in Europe is that I have seen a fair amount of homelessness in certain places, just not necessarily in cities’ core tourist centers. And with a little more reporting, I think that’s the answer — there’s a huge amount of country-to-country variation in homelessness in Europe, just as there is a lot of state-to-state variation in the U.S. But, at least some European countries have very acute homelessness problems.

I do think that San Francisco in particular has both a very serious homelessness problem and also has made the idiosyncratic decision to specifically concentrate the problem near many of its hotels and cultural amenities. That leads a lot of visitors to develop a negative impression of the city. And it’s a reminder that there are really two different issues facing governments — why do people struggle to find housing, and how should you manage the problem of homelessness once it exists? Americans seem to really want to debate the second question, with progressives tending to favor soft approaches and conservatives preferring tougher ones. I think European policy is generally more on the “tough” side.

But it’s actually very bad for people to not be able to find a place to live, and it’s a surprisingly fixable problem.

Defining the problem

When people say they are bothered by homelessness, there are really two different things that might be bothering them.

When I do a column on homelessness that shows the homelessness rate is not positively correlated with the housing vacancy rate (indeed, the relationship goes in the other direction), I am defining the problem as the share of the population that does not have a home to live in. In other words — homelessness is more severe where more people are homeless.

But if you read NextDoor posts, it’s clear that most people aren’t particularly interested in the question of how many people in their city or metro area have no housing. What they worry about is homeless people impacting their subjective experience of the city. So they worry about unhoused people being in their neighborhood and in places that they go. They worry about the visible signs of the unhoused like tents and other encampments in clear public view. They worry about aggressive panhandling in commercial corridors they frequent. And perhaps most of all, they worry about disorderly conduct by unhoused people that could impact them.

But these are actually different issues. I visited Austin a couple of times during the period when the City Council had legalized camping in public spaces and then again shortly after they passed Proposition B, re-banning camping and also cracking down on certain panhandling practices. These policy changes made a big difference to the experience of staying in a downtown hotel for a couple of days and walking around. In particular, the riverwalk just west of I-35 went from being a nice place to take a stroll, to a kind of alarming place full of disturbed people, back to being a nice place to take a stroll. Proposition B didn’t do anything at all to solve Austin’s problems of housing affordability or the severe toll that takes on the unhoused, but it did solve the problem of making a downtown park more pleasant.

Precisely because it doesn’t address the underlying issue of homelessness, this isn’t the sort of solution American progressives tend to favor. But it is similar to the approach in many European cities. I think Americans who broadly stereotype Europe as more left-wing than the United States underrate the extent to which that’s not really true except on the specific question of taxation levels.

Here are some links:

In other words, part of the reason you tend not to see large numbers of unhoused people while visiting major European cities is that major European cities invest time and resources in making sure that you don’t see them. European countries generally spend more than the United States on their police departments and have larger numbers of police officers per capita1 so plenty of personnel are available to enforce these orders, especially in high-profile areas. But homelessness does exist.

Statistics on homelessness in Europe

The OECD data on homelessness indicates that the United States is pretty middling. Note that Australia’s numbers on the chart below are so high because they have an unusually broad definition of homelessness, and Germany’s numbers are inflated by counting refugees in temporary accommodations as homeless.

But leaving those cases aside, America has more homelessness than some countries and less than others.

It’s enlightening to compare European countries to large American states. You’ll see here that the UK, France, New York, and California all have very serious homelessness problems. In Florida, Denmark, and Texas, things are much better, though it’s still not an entirely trivial issue.

I would not necessarily take these numbers super literally. We have used the most up-to-date figures available, but that meant comparing different years in some cases. And the counting methodologies are not identical from country to country. So while the chart says Denmark is a bit better than Florida, I wouldn’t be shocked if Florida is actually a bit better than Denmark.

The point is that homelessness is a problem in both the United States and Europe, but that on both continents, it is concentrated in certain places.

But in addition to the actual quantity of homeless people, there is the question of homelessness management. Some U.S. progressives have adopted the view that it’s best to take a very lax approach to unhoused people camping out in public spaces. That creates a nuisance to the non-homeless, and I think is not a great idea.

Turning parks into open-air homeless shelters isn’t great

When I first visited D.C. around 2001, McPherson Square near the White House was full of people living in tents. When I most recently visited McPherson Square near the White House last week, it was again full of people living in tents.

But for the bulk of my years in D.C., McPherson Square hasn’t been full of people living in tents; it’s been a nice park providing green space and recreational opportunities.

The basic justification for clearing encampments out of parks and other public areas is the same as the basic justification for having parks in the first place. New York could sell Central Park to real estate developers and raise a bunch of money, but even Matt Yglesias isn’t so crazy as to think they should do that. The park is, after all, an amenity that makes the city a nice place to live. And decent cities dedicate economic resources to things like parks, libraries, and other nice-to-have public services.

But if the park is full of people living in tents, then it’s not a nice amenity.

I think most people assume that nobody would live in a tent in a park unless they had absolutely no choice, but as best I can tell, that’s not the case.

You can find various generally sympathetic articles about why some people prefer sleeping in a tent in the park to sleeping in a homeless shelter. But from the standpoint of city management, the question is whether or not the park is worth having at all. D.C. lately seems to have gone soft on McPherson Square in part because it’s right by two other parks (Lafayette Square and the lovely, newly renovated Franklin Park), and demand for downtown parks has plummeted during the pandemic. But if the city decides that we don’t really need McPherson Square to operate as a park, then they should ask the National Park Service to turn the land over to some other purpose like an apartment building. Or if we want to use that space in a way that helps homeless people, we should build a homeless shelter. But if we want it to operate as a park, then it shouldn’t be full of tents.

Legalize smaller dwellings

I don’t want to just redo the whole sermon about how there would be less homelessness if the market price of housing were lower, which would be the case if we made it legal to build more new housing.

So instead, I’ll offer a slightly different observation. In the United States, the average home contains 2.4 rooms per person, and 99.9% of dwellings have indoor flushing toilets. In Poland, which is a lot poorer, there are only 1.1 rooms per person and 97% of dwellings have toilets. In Latvia, it’s 1.2 rooms per person but only 86.1% with toilets. Now suppose you were allowed to build a long hallway full of tiny apartments with space for a bed and a kitchenette and shared bathroom facilities — one room per person, in other words, with no bathroom. That doesn’t sound like a great place to live, but it’s better than a tent in a park. And it would also offer some of the privacy and dignity of having your own place with a locking door that a shelter lacks.

You might wonder why homelessness in Europe isn’t much worse than in the United States — it’s poorer on average, but also more densely populated with higher land costs. Part of the answer is about inequality. The median American is richer than the median resident of any European country. But the 10th percentile is different — the bottom 10% of Norwegians, Danes, Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, German, Belgian, Irish, and French people are richer than the bottom 10% of Americans.

But despite having relatively poor low-income people, we generally have more spacious homes because, on average, people are richer. In some parts of the country, we address the low end of the housing market with manufactured homes. But in more built-up areas, what used to happen is that older homes would either be subdivided or turned into rooming houses as part of filtering down-market.

All curbs on housing production contribute to a lack of affordability, but regulations impacting the lowest end of the housing market seem particularly significant when you’re talking about the margin between having a place to live and being homeless. If Europe tried to bump up their minimum quality standards to American levels, they would probably end up unhousing a lot of people. But by the same token, if we simultaneously legalized larger buildings and smaller subdivisions of existing structures, we could greatly diminish the need for shelters. Crowded housing is not great, but it’s better than a tent for the occupant and better for the city than turning space over to encampments.