Reading roundup

Sabbatical... Good time to get some reading done... 

In Ascension
Martin MacInnes

This 500-pager is at its best at the beginning, as we learn about the protagonist-biologist Leigh and her troubled childhood; and in the approach to the somewhat freaky and ambiguous ending. I love alien contact plots, and this book has one... sort of... but the central 2/3 of the novel wastes way too many pages on hard sci fi and algae farming.

Homelessness Is a Housing Problem
Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern

Yes, it is... the title may qualify for the biggest "duh!" of all time. But as the authors note, the discourse around homelessness has often centered on the individual economic and behavioral traits associated with being unhoused, as well as debates over policy priorities, such as transitional shelter vs. permanent housing, "housing first," vs. services, tough on crime vs. liberal drug and vagrancy laws, etc. Colburn and Aldern make a simple but essential point: Individuals who are more vulnerable– whether due to poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, or other traits– are more likely to be "selected" into homelessness in any given community, but the size of the homelessness problem is a function of conditions in that community's rental housing market. One can think in terms of a bell-shaped distribution of vulnerability across individuals, with the cost of housing determining the vulnerability cutoff between being housed and unhoused, and therefore the size of the homeless "tail."

The book relies on fairly simpleminded statistical evidence: essentially a series of bivariate scatter plots of the rate of homelessness (as measure by point-in-time surveys) against various potential determinants (such as poverty rates), in a cross-section of cities or regions. Chapter by chapter, they dismiss most of the standard accounts until they get to rents and housing supply. The economist in me wanted to see a big multivariate regression table at the end, estimating a "horse race" between the various potential determinants simultaneously, and they claim in the text to have done this, with no substantive change in the findings. I believe them, but it would be nice if they could share their data somewhere. Then, if I assign this book in a class, I could have the students replicate and tweak the analysis. 

The book's core recommendations flow from the findings: Basically, build more affordable housing. Of course, it's easy to say that, but they do offer some good discussions of the practical politics and political economy of housing development. They particularly advocate subsidized increases in housing supply at the low end of the rental market, although their cross-city comparisons seem to affirm that a more elastic overall supply of market-rate housing might do the trick. So: More money to help the most vulnerable in our communities! But also... Build baby build!

The Niagara River
Kay Ryan

Very short, very clever poems. At her best, her internal rhymes, para-rhymes, and wordplay bring both delight and epiphany. At times, they veer over the line into precious. But late at night just before I turn out the light, almost the whole lot hit the spot.