understanding homelessness through the lens of housing affordability: insights from a mary’s place lunch & learn
At a lunch & learn webinar hosted by Mary's Place, community members gathered to explore one of the most pressing questions facing our region: Why is homelessness so much more prevalent in some areas, including Seattle and King County, than others?
Mary’s Place CEO, Dominique Alex, sat down for a conversation with Gregg Colburn, Associate Professor of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington and co-author of the book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, to unpack how and why the homelessness crisis has become so overwhelming in King County.
The discussion challenged many common assumptions about homelessness and highlighted the critical role housing affordability and availability plays in driving the crisis we see in Seattle and across King County.
A Growing Need in Our Community
Mary’s Place began over 25 years ago as a small day center serving women experiencing homelessness in downtown Seattle. Today, we operate 24/7 family shelters across King County, providing more than 360 beds each night for families with children.
But the need continues to outpace available resources.
Every day, Mary’s Place receives approximately 50 to 60 calls from families seeking shelter. And because shelters across King County are full, only one or two families are able to come inside each week.
For families who cannot immediately access shelter, our mobile outreach teams meet them where they are, whether in cars, tents, or other unstable situations, helping connect them to resources, flexible funding, and pathways to housing.
At the same time, Mary’s Place is working upstream to prevent homelessness before it starts by helping families stay housed and avoid the trauma and long-term impacts of displacement.
Homelessness Amid Affluence
One of the most striking ideas discussed during the lunch & learn was a statement from Colburn’s book: “For those most likely to experience homelessness, it is not so much a symptom of poverty as a symptom of affluence.”
Colburn explained that homelessness in the United States has evolved significantly over the past century. During the Great Depression, widespread unemployment and economic collapse led to visible encampments known as “Hoovervilles,” named after then-President Herbert Hoover. At the time, the connection between economic hardship and homelessness felt intuitive.
What is different about modern homelessness, Colburn noted, is where homelessness is most concentrated today. Some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country are found in some of the nation’s wealthiest cities, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston.
“Homelessness thrives amidst affluence because of the impact it has on housing costs,” Colburn explained.
Rapid job and population growth, especially in higher-paying industries like tech, increased competition for housing and drove rents and home prices higher in cities like Seattle. At the same time, wages for many essential workers and working class families haven’t keep pace with the rising cost of living, widening income inequality and making stable housing harder to afford.
Consistently rising area median income (AMI), driven by high-income job growth and income increase among the area’s highest earners, has also pushed many previously affordable housing options out of reach for lower-income families. Most affordable housing programs don’t use a fixed dollar amount—they use a percentage of AMI (for example, 30%, 50%, or 80% of AMI) to determine who qualifies for housing and what rent they pay. When AMI goes up, those thresholds go up with it.
In expensive housing markets, even small financial disruptions or personal crises can quickly lead to housing instability because affordable housing options are so limited. Once families lose housing, the shortage of deeply affordable places to live makes it even harder to regain stability.
Understanding Root Causes vs. Risk Factors
To help explain the difference between individual risk factors and larger systemic causes, Colburn shared an analogy from the book that resonated strongly with attendees: musical chairs.
Imagine 10 people and 10 chairs. As the game begins, one chair is removed, leaving nine chairs for 10 people. When the music stops, someone inevitably loses.
In Colburn’s example, the person left standing has a bad ankle and is moving more slowly than everyone else. If asked why he lost, he would likely point to his injury. And that explanation would technically be true.
But the deeper issue is that there were not enough chairs in the first place.
Colburn explained that homelessness works much the same way. People experiencing domestic violence, illness, disability, job loss, discrimination, addiction, or mental health challenges are more vulnerable in an intensely competitive housing market. When housing is scarce and unaffordable, those vulnerabilities increase the likelihood that someone will “lose the game” and fall into homelessness.
“We’re playing a vicious game of musical chairs for housing right now,” Colburn said, referring to high-cost areas like King County.
The analogy helps illustrate an important distinction: individual crises may trigger homelessness, but the underlying driver is a structural shortage of accessible, truly affordable housing.
Colburn also emphasized that while challenges such as mental illness or addiction may be highly visible in cities like Seattle, and therefore easy to point to as causes of homelessness, the reality is “there are people who are struggling with addiction and mental illness in every city and at every income level across America.What differs between places where these challenges are visible on the streets and places where they are not is whether there is housing people can actually afford.”
Crisis Response vs. Long-Term Solutions and the need to work upstream
Another major theme of the discussion was the distinction between responding to homelessness and preventing it altogether.
Colburn explained that his research has seen much of the funding communities spend on homelessness goes toward crisis response systems, including shelters, emergency services, sanitation, and outreach programs.
“When we spend money on a crisis response system,” Colburn said, “it wasn’t designed to end homelessness. It was designed to help people in a moment of incredible need. While those investments are absolutely necessary and life-saving, communities also need investments upstream in affordable housing, supportive housing, and programs that prevent people from entering homelessness in the first place.”
The conversation also explored the importance of homelessness prevention and keeping families stably housed before they ever enter the homelessness response system.
“Paying someone’s rent for the next few months or investing in affordable housing programs is far more cost effective than paying for them in the crisis response system,” Colburn explained. “Once families enter homelessness, the costs extend far beyond shelter. Communities often pay through emergency room visits, sanitation systems, crisis services, shelters, and other public systems. And More importantly, the human cost is enormous, especially for children.”
Dominique shared that Mary’s Place has increasingly focused on scaling prevention efforts aimed at helping families remain in their hard-won homes. “Not only is it more cost effective,” Dominique explained, “but the trauma on children is way less when you can keep a family in their home. Homelessness has long-term behavioral and developmental impacts for children and we know childhood homelessness is the biggest predictor of experiencing homelessness as an adult. If we can keep families housed, we can disrupt generational cycles of homelessness and trauma.”
Building a Pathway From Crisis to Stability
In addition to expanding prevention efforts, Mary's Place is advancing a new model that reflects the core findings discussed in the webinar: that lasting solutions must address both upstream housing affordability and accessibility for families and the immediate needs of families in crisis.
In partnership with Mercy Housing Northwest, we are developing a first-of-its-kind campus that co-locates emergency family shelter with affordable, family-sized apartments.
This innovative approach creates a seamless pathway from crisis to stability. Families will be able to move directly from shelter into permanent, affordable housing on the same campus—removing many of the barriers, delays, and disruptions that too often stand between crisis and long-term housing stability.
The vision is for this campus to serve as a national model: one that provides immediate safety for families in profound crisis while also ensuring a clear, direct path to lasting stability, opportunity, and home.