Book Review: Homelessness Is A Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn And Clayton Page Aldern

This Book Could Have Been A Credit Card Sized Pamphlet. The title of this review + the title of this book is really all you need to know here. Everything else in this review will be me telling you a bit about why I said what I've already said, and everything else in the book is little more than a meta analysis of the housing data available as of the Covid Summer of 2020 or so with the usual academic/ leftist talking points as to what needs to be done.

Which is a shame, because the authors actually *do* have a sentence or two about what could actually be done to eliminate the housing problem once and for all... and then skip right by it in favor of the usual "government should spend more money" bullshit. (Which, if you agree with the authors' view there... well, you won't consider it as much bullshit as I do. You'll be as wrong as they are, but you'll enjoy your experience with the book more than I did. :) )

In a book that spends a half dozen or so Audible hours debunking most myths from both left and right as to what causes homelessness, and with the actual solutions glaringly obvious to anyone without partisan or home ownership blinders (namely, severely curtail all zoning and planning regulations and allow builders to build whatever they can sell, along with increased liability penalties for blatant disregard for safety), it is truly rather shocking how much time is spent simply writing words around the very title of the book that add next to nothing to the overall discourse or even knowledge of even general audiences with little actual knowledge of the topic at hand.

So just to be explicit with my star deduction reasons: One star is deducted for such blatant myopia. The solution was *right there*. You *mentioned* it. And you walked right on by it due to your partisan blinders and didn't even seriously consider it at all. The other star is deducted for the lack of any real substance at all here. Seriously, this "scholarship" is something I would expect someone taking maybe SOC 201 or so to be able to write, and adds about as much knowledge to the zeitgeist as such a sophomoric college paper.

Not recommended, sadly.

This review of Homelessness Is A Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern was originally written on October 3, 2026.