Matthew Moore: Beginning Nov. 12, the Urban Land Institute of Northwest Arkansas will be hosting its 2025 Place Summit at the Town Center in Fayetteville. The keynote speaker will be Gregg Colburn, a housing policy expert, professor at the University of Washington, and co-author of the book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem. We spoke earlier this month over Zoom about his work, including how he got started on this topic.
Gregg Colburn: I describe myself as a second-career academic. I got my start in investment banking and private equity in New York and then left that world as I was turning 40 and got my Ph.D. and studied housing in that process. There were probably a couple of things that got me interested in housing. One was I lived in New York City in the 1990s when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was cleaning up Manhattan. And I saw what that meant riding the subway every day to my office downtown at Wall Street. It was pretty harsh. It’s actually, frankly, not that dissimilar from what we’re doing right now in a lot of our big cities, which is grabbing people and moving them out.
That was, you know, I was pretty self-absorbed in my own world at that point, but I was kind of observing this from a distance, saying, oh, that’s kind of interesting. And then I moved to Chicago, and I coached Little League baseball in the Near North Little League, which was for Cabrini-Green, which at that time was one of the most notorious public housing projects in the United States that has since been torn down. And so I got to meet these boys who grew up in Cabrini-Green and families. And it was a radically different experience than what I had growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis.
When I left my first career, I really wanted to focus on housing because I just think it’s fundamental. If you think about it from a Maslow perspective, we’ve got to get that right before we worry about health care or education or all that. So that’s kind of a long-winded answer to a few things that were catalysts for me in wanting to be interested in this topic.
Matthew Moore: Well, lucky for you, public radio is the perfect place for long-winded answers to questions, right? I want to touch on the Cabrini-Green element here. I grew up in Illinois, the very southern tip of Illinois. So I only knew of Cabrini-Green as kind of an abstract idea. But I also lived in St. Louis for quite some time, too, which was the short-lived home for Pruitt-Igoe. And now that space is just a grown-up nothing. I’m interested in your experience there when Cabrini-Green was actually a functioning, useful place that had some sort of ability to help elevate people as it was intended to. What do you think about places like Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green and these sorts of developments?
Gregg Colburn: Yeah. So the history of public housing is pretty fascinating in the United States. I was working with kids at Cabrini-Green in the late 1990s as the towers were coming down. And what was interesting about coaching Little League baseball at that time was so many families had been moved out already because the towers had come down, they had to expand the age group. And so we had second graders and eighth graders on the same team, which was—you know, if you’ve ever dealt with kids, that’s not a good age span. You had kids shaving and then other kids who looked like they were 4 years old. And so it was challenging.
I was kind of at the point where Cabrini-Green was coming down. Chicago realized that this was prime real estate just north of downtown. Mayor Daley had had his eye on this for some time. And these families were being displaced to other projects around Chicago, including the Robert Taylor Homes down on the South Side near Comiskey. As you come into Chicago from the south end—and Pruitt-Igoe was obviously maybe exhibit A for large, dense public housing projects that didn’t work real well.
My advisor at the University of Minnesota when I was getting my Ph.D. was a guy named Ed Goetz, who has studied public housing, and Ed has a really interesting perspective on this, which informed my understanding. He was getting his Ph.D. at Northwestern at the time that Cabrini-Green was being torn down. He began studying this because he said, you know, the national media called it the gates of hell. It was crime-ridden, drugs—it was a tough, tough place. Yet when Chicago Housing Authority announced they were going to tear it down, what happened? People stood out and protested and said, no, this is our home. And he said, well, if this is the gates of hell, shouldn’t these people be celebrating, right?
And so it was this interesting contrast of, yes, this is not great housing, but it is their home. It is their community. And we didn’t handle that redevelopment real well. Cabrini-Green is now completely gentrified. There is some mixed-income housing there. I haven’t been to the Pruitt-Igoe site, but it sounds like that hasn’t been—you know, partly there’s not been housing demand in St. Louis, just given population declines and things.
When people say public housing failed in the United States, I always push back a little bit. Ed has done some really good research on that. You walk around New York City, you walk around Seattle, where I am now—there’s public housing all over. You just don’t know what it is. It’s just an apartment building that’s owned by Seattle Housing Authority, and people are living in that. So I frankly think it was a mistake for our federal government to step away from public housing as much as they did, because a lot of it worked pretty well—Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Green maybe being the exceptions to that. There are reasons why those things didn’t work real well. But had we actually invested the proper money and constructed them in good ways, I think that could have been a really good contribution to our housing stock that we’ve lost over the last 30 years, unfortunately.
Matthew Moore: I wonder, too, if those very high-profile examples of it not working have played a rippling effect on why we choose not to continue or to try to reiterate public housing.
Gregg Colburn: Absolutely. When you study the history of public housing, the public narratives and media narratives of public housing in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s were pretty damning. If you were just concerned citizen X living somewhere and someone asked you about public housing, you’d say, “Well, what did I see on the CBS Nightly News tonight?” It looked pretty bad. I heard about the shootings, the drugs. So yeah, the high-profile disasters completely tainted the public’s and the nation’s perception of public housing.
Part of it was we limited the dollars that you could put into public housing per square foot. We concentrated race and poverty into these tracts of properties. My favorite story is a delegation from the Soviet Union came to Chicago and toured either the Robert Taylor Homes or Cabrini-Green. One Soviet guy said, “This looks like a Soviet prison,” in terms of construction style and the dollars that went into it.
I just got back from the Netherlands. Thirty percent of their housing is publicly or socially owned, and it’s not large tracts of high-rise, dilapidated housing. It’s just part of the housing stock. Teachers, firefighters, radio hosts, professors live in social housing, and it’s not stigmatized. But what we did was radically stigmatize public housing, the people who live in it, and our failure. I think that failure is not of the individuals or the concept—it was the way we implemented it in the United States.
Matthew Moore: You’re one of the authors of Homelessness Is a Housing Problem. As someone who lived in New York for quite some time, what was your experience with homelessness there, and maybe how did that shape your second career—your trajectory to start thinking about how we have to do something different?
Gregg Colburn: What’s interesting is New York—I'll use Seattle and New York as the West Coast and East Coast models, places where I’ve lived. The visible manifestation of homelessness in New York is not nearly as prevalent as it is in Seattle or Los Angeles or San Francisco. That’s largely because New York has a massive shelter system. That system was created through litigation, and there was a right to shelter created through law.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t homelessness, and it doesn’t mean that in the 1990s Giuliani wasn’t really focused on cleaning up Manhattan—and as I say, he did to a certain extent. Times Square became more pleasant and less seedy, and they got people off the trains who were experiencing homelessness, often with forceful methods.
Frankly, the catalyst for writing this book was coming to Seattle and just seeing, oh my goodness, the massive amounts of unsheltered homelessness really have changed the feel of Seattle. I’ve been here eight years, but people who’ve been here longer talk about how it’s impacted that. Certainly the case in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well.
When people say, “Well, Gregg, we have a huge problem—New York doesn’t,” I say, “No, they just hide it better.” They have the largest homeless population in the United States—it’s just hidden in the shelter system.
The huge challenges in our big coastal cities motivated me to write this book—to just say, what is going on in these cities? Why is it so bad here? It’s not nearly as bad in Chicago or St. Louis or Detroit or Cleveland. That was a motivator for me.
Matthew Moore: What surprised you in the process of writing this book and doing the research it took to come up with a thesis-turned title?
Gregg Colburn: What surprised me was that one, this is really a work of translation to a certain extent. There’s been a lot of research done before, and we were packaging that and doing our own research on top of it. I had this idea in my head—a conceptual framework—and as I kept running analyses, everything kept coming out as expected.
I knew kind of what the story could be, but it actually became more compelling. As I was doing the analysis and writing, I thought, oh my goodness, this is really falling into place. These other narratives that are so prevalent just don’t help us understand this regional variation. That was the focus of the book—why does Seattle have five times the per capita homelessness of Chicago? That was the organizing question.
It kind of fit together better than I thought. I thought there’d be more things we’d have to navigate, but it was pretty aligned with the overall thesis.
Matthew Moore: You were surprised that you weren’t more surprised?
Gregg Colburn: Well, I was surprised that everything fit together as neatly as it did. I just thought it’d be messier, as most research is. It wasn’t that there wasn’t some messiness, but the story held surprisingly well.
Matthew Moore: As we sit here in the middle of the country, especially where KUAF is based here in Fayetteville, there is a very visible homeless population. But throughout Northwest Arkansas, there seems to be a higher-than-expected amount of homelessness in the region. Looking at the data you’re presenting, it doesn’t necessarily feel like it should be a surprise that that’s the case here. Would you agree?
Gregg Colburn: Yeah. I will say, since the book came out in 2022, I’ve been traveling around the country. What has shocked me is the consistent story I’m hearing in the middle part of the country—really tightening housing markets. Rents are going up, vacancies aren’t there. This is true in Iowa, Missouri, Northwest Arkansas. And there are associated increases with homelessness in those cases, which isn’t surprising.
I think your unique circumstance has two elements that are really important. One is a university town. I’ve visited a lot of university towns, and consistently housing dynamics are challenging there. Then you have a corporate boom coming out of Bentonville and Walmart. Combine those things, and the fact that you’re seeing housing challenges and homelessness is tragic but not surprising.
You go to Eugene, Ore., home of the University of Oregon—it doesn’t have the boom you have, but it’s an expensive place with a lot of homelessness. Madison, Wis.; Lexington, Ky.—same deal. So if it makes you feel better, you’re in good company, but it’s a warning sign. You have some forces that are positive—a university is good, having strong corporations is good—but it comes with consequences that warrant attention from your community.
Matthew Moore: There’s some solidarity there, but also a bit of a warning sign, right? There are probably some college towns further down the road than others. Where do you think Fayetteville falls on that trajectory?
Gregg Colburn: I’ve started looking into your housing market data as I’m preparing for my visit next month. You’re not Berkeley, Calif., yet, thankfully. You have a ways to go—I hope you never get there. Berkeley is a great place, but having just been down there, it’s unbelievably unaffordable. There’s tons of homelessness. The Berkeley City Council just passed a measure to limit the number of students Berkeley can admit. The university is litigating that, saying the city can’t do that, but the city argues it’s having massive implications for the housing market.
So rather than building more housing, they’re saying, “You should just admit fewer students.” That’s an interesting dynamic. You’re not in the worst position, but you’re on your way. It’s not the ninth inning, but it’s probably the third, fourth, or fifth inning—which is enough to get you focused on these issues sooner rather than later.
Matthew Moore: The thing we’re laying out here is homelessness is a housing problem. But with a problem, you also have to think about a solution. Obviously, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer, but what are some strategies you recommend to places like ours—college towns, regions with major corporations—ways cities can move away from going further down the line?
Gregg Colburn: I’ll split my answer into two. One element is: what do we do with folks already experiencing homelessness in our community? There are evidence-based measures—housing plus services—that have a pretty good track record. There’s debate about whether Housing First works or not, etc. But generally speaking, we’ve had pretty good success there.
Having resources and entities focused on delivering services to people currently experiencing homelessness so that it doesn’t persist is really important. That’s one thing I’d encourage your community to do. It’s tempting to just say, “Let’s round them up and put them in prison,” but that’s terribly counterproductive.
Our book is really about the second part—how do we prevent people from entering homelessness? Because ultimately that’s the durable way to end it. You can provide services and housing, but that system just keeps getting bigger if people keep coming in. That’s the L.A. story—you just can’t keep up.
When we think about how to limit the number of people entering homelessness, that’s where we get into: Do we have sufficient housing capacity? What’s our land use? Do we have restrictive zoning that makes it hard and expensive to build housing? Do we have sufficient subsidy for people who can’t afford market-rate housing?
All those housing-related things aren’t silver bullets, but they reduce the number of people entering homelessness. This is why Detroit has way less homelessness than Seattle. People run into tough times—Detroit frankly has more poverty—but if you can find a place for $600 or $700 a month, you might make it work. If it’s $2,000 a month, it’s really hard.
Having sufficient, more affordable housing is a protective layer. That’s where a lot of these housing conversations become really important. People don’t think of them as homelessness conversations, but they are. When you show up and say, “Yes, I want multifamily housing in my neighborhood,” that’s a really good thing. Unfortunately, too many people show up and say, “I don’t want my neighborhood to change.”
If nothing changes, people will still move to your community for jobs, for education, whatever—and there will be continued pressure on the housing market. That’s going to be a real challenge for folks with lower incomes. So it’s thinking about it in two ways: how do we end it for people who have it, and how do we prevent it from happening in the first place?
Matthew Moore: It sounds like this is more than just public investment—that there has to be buy-in from the private market as well to make this feasible and long-term successful.
Gregg Colburn: Yeah, I describe this as everyone needs to be in the boat rowing—and that’s the public sector, the private sector, the nonprofit sector. We have a pretty limited system of providing housing supports—about 5% of housing units in the U.S. get some type of federal subsidy. So it’s very small.
Ninety-five percent of housing is unsubsidized at the federal level. If you think about the housing units your region needs over the next 20 years, most will be built by private developers with private capital. So we want it to be easier, cheaper, and faster for them to build, because that means they can then charge lower rents.
But that alone won’t end it. Having sufficient housing will help a lot, and then we can think about what subsidies and supports people need to access that housing. It’s a lot easier when housing is abundant. That’s the problem in Seattle—the supports we need are so expensive just to get someone up to $2,000 or $2,500 rents that they don’t go far.
Yes, this is everyone in the boat. At the same time, I joke that I get accused of being a shill for corporate interests and a socialist in the same talk. I’m a shill because I’m saying it should be easier for people to build market-rate housing—and they’ll make money in the process, that’s true. Then I get accused of being a socialist because I also say there are people who can’t afford that housing. That’s not socialism—that’s just math. There’s a mismatch between incomes and rents for a lot of people.
Matthew Moore: Gregg Colburn is an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies housing and homelessness. We’ll hear more from him later this hour on Ozarks at Large. He will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Place Summit, hosted by the Urban Land Institute of Northwest Arkansas.
Matthew Moore: Megan Brown is the director of operations for ULI NWA. She recently spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis about some of the other elements that will take place at this year’s summit.
Megan Brown: The Place Summit as a whole—there’s different options for you to participate. You can get a full pass and get everything, all ins and outs. We’ve got really great content moments, and just great networking and connecting moments.
Our opening reception—we’re actually partnering with Pack Rat for their Pint Night. It serves one of our missions to continue to partner with community organizations doing great work. They support a nonprofit organization at every event, which this year happens to be IWP, and they’re great supporters and partners of ULI, so that’s exciting.
We have a reception on our second night called The Biggest Party in Real Estate. Bold and ambitious—but we believe it’s happening. We believe there’s—you know, we work really hard, the built environment professionals, day to day on trying to make this the best place. Let’s have a moment to just come and connect and network and live it up.
Both of those opportunities, along with the keynote session I mentioned from Gregg Colburn—whether you buy the whole pass or just want to come to those moments—we have opportunities to just participate in those. We’re trying to make it accessible to the community as a whole. We really want this to be the region’s event. We’re bringing in great people to help shepherd the conversations, and we want great people from all levels to participate and access this opportunity.
There will also be workshops throughout the week. It’s been announced that there’s a regional master wastewater plan underway, being led by a consultant. We’re going to have them at the workshop talking about that. We’ll have developers, city leaders—really diving into it.
The tagline for this year’s event is “Discover, Immerse, Deliver.” And we’re working hard to hone in on that “deliver” part. How do we bring together these thought leaders, have these conversations, and really try to be honest? We called it the Place Summit to create this event that celebrates this place of Northwest Arkansas—whether you’ve been here for decades or you’re just moving here, there is a sense of place in this region. It looks different to different people, but there’s a reason people continue to move here, and our population continues to grow rapidly.
How do we celebrate some of those moments? How do we get real and honest about challenges we’re still facing and mistakes we’ve made along the way? How do we bring those conversations to the forefront honestly and then dive into, okay, what’s next? How do we not just sit in a room for three days and hear people talk and come up with great ideas? How do we get those into action?
Matthew Moore: Megan Brown is the director of operations for the Urban Land Institute of Northwest Arkansas. She spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis inside the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio One.
Back to our conversation with Gregg Colburn, the keynote speaker for the 2025 Place Summit. He says he’s been to Fayetteville before, although it was about 20 years ago. He says he’s intentional in the way he delivers his keynotes in an effort to bring people into the conversation locally.
Gregg Colburn: What I say to folks is you might be frustrated about homelessness because you think it’s a moral outrage, that it’s an indictment of our American system. If that’s the way you feel, come on into the conversation. You might be frustrated because you’re a restaurateur and you’re tired of someone urinating outside your restaurant. I understand why you’re frustrated—come into the conversation. You might be an employer who says, “Boy, housing’s getting so expensive I can’t hire or retain people.” That’s the Seattle story. You’re frustrated by that—come into the conversation.
I try not to judge people’s reasons for being in the room, but come on in and let’s have this conversation. We might have our own perspectives and ideologies, but it’s really important to have people at the table.
The second thing I’ll do is provide a national overlay—this is what we’re seeing around the country, over time. Then I’ll conclude with my message for your community: these are the dynamics here, here’s the data. This is a problem. It’s not a Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles problem yet, but you are on the path toward a bigger challenge.
What I say to folks—and I almost make this joke at every talk I go to—is think of me as a character from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—the Ghost of Christmas to Come. If you don’t do anything, if you sit on your hands for the next 10 years, you might not like what you see. We in Seattle would pay a lot of money to go back 15 years and make different decisions. You are in the position to make those decisions now—and that’s hard.
We’re acting now in Seattle because we have to—the crisis forced us to act. But real courage in leadership is acting before you have to. That’s where you are in your community. It’s a problem. It’s growing. But you have the time to make these decisions now. If you wait, you might be forced into those decisions when things get worse.
That’s the message—and that’s a different message than I give when I go to San Francisco, right? Because that’s kind of like, well, you’re in a real pickle right now. I actually prefer going to places like Fayetteville, Lexington, and Indianapolis because you have the resources, the brainpower, and the time to change trajectory that our coastal cities just don’t have anymore.
Matthew Moore: The Urban Land Institute is an outlet that thinks a lot about the built community and the built world within the natural landscape. Here in Northwest Arkansas, we take a lot of pride in our natural landscapes and non-built environments. How does that play a role in how you think about keeping green spaces in cities—keeping places where people can enjoy being outside, but also live close enough to a shopping center to get the things they need?
Gregg Colburn: That’s a great question. One of the pushbacks I’ll get is, “Gregg, you’re in conflict with environmentalists. You just want to build, build, build and create a whole bunch of housing.” And so what I say to folks is there are times when affordable housing and environmental stewardship can be in conflict. For example, certain building regulations can be better for the environment but are more costly.
But those are lower-order conflicts in my opinion. If you go up a level, those two things are very much in alignment. Dense housing is much better for affordability and far better for environmental stewardship because you don’t have people sprawling out into farmland. You don’t have people driving an hour to work every day.
That transition to a denser urban core can be bumpy politically because people don’t necessarily like that change. But that’s where we need to go. One of the challenges we have is people think about density and imagine Cabrini-Green or Midtown Manhattan. That’s not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about communities with more density near the urban core that can still be charming, walkable, with green space. When you think about cool neighborhoods in Boston or Philadelphia, people walk around and say, “Oh, I’d like to live here.” That’s dense housing—it’s not high-rises. It’s six-story flats, but they’ve got a lot of housing units in a block, trees, sidewalks, a park at the end of the street.
Having the conversation about what dense housing looks like and how it can be additive, not destructive, is super important. We haven’t done a great job of that. I’m in a design college at UW—we have architecture, urban design, and planning in our college. When I go around the country, I think we haven’t done a great job of visualizing what density could look like for communities. So they just go immediately to the worst-case scenario instead of seeing, “Oh no, this could be good for us.”
ULI does really good work on this—thinking about what the built environment looks like. We have the same thing in Seattle—we care deeply about our natural environment. It’s beautiful. We actually can’t sprawl because we have mountains and water—it’s not even an option. The West Coast has lots of urban growth boundaries for this reason, which at times becomes a challenge of how to grow—it certainly forces you to go up a little bit.
Matthew Moore: As you were talking, I couldn’t help but think about how we often think of the American dream as a home with a backyard, and density takes that idea kind of out of the picture, right? If we’re all living in dense spaces, we can’t all have our backyards. But when we think about Boston or even New York, the places people go for backyards are giant public parks. Those are the proverbial backyards where people can go and play—and they’re living in community in those spaces too. How much are you able to articulate that, especially as you think about the Midwest and heartland areas in the middle of the country?
Gregg Colburn: We were just in Madrid, and everyone lives in an apartment. But they have great parks all over the place, and everyone shows up there. There are restaurants, parents get a drink, kids ride bikes around—it’s a really cool way to live. Most people would say, “Oh yeah, that’s nice.”
When you think about the Midwest—there will always be a place for single-family homes if that’s what you want. I live in a single-family home, so I’m not disparaging that. We’re not outlawing that. But if you’re going to live in the urban core, we probably shouldn’t have as much single-family housing close to downtown as we do.
Seattle is zoned 70% to 75% single-family in the city proper, and we have this massive tech boom and no place to put people because 75% of parcels are already built out with single-family homes. I think that’s where we have to have the conversation about evolving our urban core a little bit.
It doesn’t necessarily mean high-rises—but ADUs and other ways we can create more housing capacity. I think, frankly, we have two college-age kids. I’m not convinced the next generation—every single person—wants a white picket fence and a backyard. My kids are done mowing lawns.
So yeah, I just think the 1950s “ideal,” if you were white, is not necessarily the way we’re going to live over the next hundred years. Some people will, others won’t. Our cities will be better if we can accommodate more folks in a graceful way through gentle density.
Matthew Moore: Gregg Colburn is an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies housing and homelessness. He’s also the co-author of the book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem.
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