Opinion: Is housing a game of musical chairs?

A popular analogy that I’ve been seeing lately is that housing is a cruel and expensive game of “musical chairs.”

The gist is this: There are more people than places to live. The rich find housing easily, followed by the middle-class and so on. But at the bottom of the economic ladder, someone gets left out once the music stops. The person who has more problems than just a lack of money is the most disadvantaged.

Just like there are never enough chairs in the game, there are never enough houses to buy or rent to meet the need.

With housing a hot topic, the analogy recently has been popping up in viral videos , talks by housing experts , and plenty of news articles . But the idea itself has a longer and deeper history.

Back in 1990, Elliott D. Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, wrote an article describing housing and homeless policy as a “game of musical chairs.” He calls homelessness a policy problem where “too many poor people are asked to chase too few housing units.”

I’ve become fond of the analogy because it is a systemic interpretation of our housing challenges. Rather than seeing homelessness as an individual failing tied to mental illness, unemployment or substance abuse, it highlights factors such as high prices and low vacancy rates that lie beyond any one person’s control.

Individual circumstances and choices certainly matter. But entertaining a systemic explanation allows us to consider difficult but far-reaching choices to alleviate the problem. Responding to homelessness as an adaptive challenge allows the housed to consider how they can help ensure their communities have more forms of affordable housing available or better co-existence between neighborhoods and homeless services such as shelters.

The Journal’s decision to focus on covering the topic of housing and convening conversations in Kansas around it in 2024 initially felt like a departure. After all, the topics selected for the Journal Talks initiative since 2016 were hotly debated and polarizing national issues – the relationship between law enforcement and communities of color, guns and public safety, and immigration. Where would the heat come from in a topic such as housing?

In our edition of The Journal on housing, it often comes when we cover homelessness, whether in Topeka, Wyandotte County, Wichita or Johnson County. The topic touches us emotionally in a way that charts or stories about tax credits and building permits never will.

It hits so hard, in fact, that you might be tempted to turn away. Homelessness is easier to live alongside when it’s out of sight and out of mind. For the housed, being presented with homelessness on our streets, at our intersections and at camps along our rivers is perhaps a subconscious reminder that we live in an insecure world.

As a first step to better understanding our state’s housing challenges, this edition of The Journal asks our readers to confront the problem of homelessness, not just for their sake, but for everyone’s.

We don’t have to look too far back in our history to see how confronting the challenges that the most vulnerable experience improves things for everybody. Something as simple as curb cuts on city streets, for instance, helped drive changes – and a movement – that made our country more accessible not just for the disabled but for mothers pushing strollers, children on bikes and elderly people with canes.

The idea that you can benefit by providing housing security for the homeless might seem like a leap at first. But I’d encourage you to consider it, because it’s exactly the kind of systemic interpretation that might help us imagine – and eventually produce – a different reality.

Chris Green is the executive editor of The Journal. The print version of The Journal’s housing edition is schedule to release to the mail on Aug. 9, 2024.

A version of this article appears in the Summer 2024 issue of The Journal , a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit Kansas Leadership Center dot org . Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.

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