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I didn't really want to buy that house.

I'd always been a renter. It just seemed easier. The landlord takes care of the maintenance, fixes the roof, calls the plumber. Sometimes they mow the lawn and shovel the snow.

And, to a journeyman newspaper reporter, the prospect of having to sell a house struck me as a real impediment to being free to, well, journey to the next bigger newspaper when the opportunity arose. As it had four times already.

But I had reached a point where I thought (foolishly, as it turned out) that I was finished packing and unpacking, town to town, up and down the dial. I was now a second-tier pillar of the community. So becoming a property owner, building equity and all that stuff, seemed appropriate.

But what really convinced me that I had made the right decision was a chance meeting with the young folks who were about to move in to my rented ranch-style duplex. The man wearing the uniform of the local frozen pizza factory and his young wife were clearly overjoyed by the prospect of moving into a decent, warm, relatively modern abode.

It then seemed selfish of me to keep living beneath my means, holding on to a relatively inexpensive home, when these nice folks clearly needed it more than I did, and appreciated it more than I ever would.

And, I suppose, when the pizza-maker moved into my old place, he freed up a smaller apartment, a mobile home, something, for someone who needed that. The whole there's-always-a-bigger-fish process seemed to work out well enough in that small community where, on the surface, nobody was homeless.

Now, five home purchases later, I live in a community where homelessness is one of the biggest, and most intractable, topics on the local radar.

There's all kinds of talk of siting new shelters, spending lots of money and even, dare we hope, expanding Medicaid in Utah. But the key to the whole mess is still that, no matter how many upwardly mobile professionals — or hack writers — buy houses, the rentals they leave behind are still too few and way too expensive.

Apartment blocks are going up at an amazing clip in and around Salt Lake City. In theory, the people who move into those $1,000-and-up — sometimes way up — units will leave behind a place that not only was cheaper, because it wasn't as fancy or as well-located, but will wind up being cheaper still because the old buildings will have to cut their rents to compete with all the new construction.

In practice, a lot of the units being vacated by the new downtown dwellers are in Denver, Detroit or San Francisco, so market rents here continue to be pushed up.

And that leaves no place for the low-wage pizza makers, call center talkers, hotel housekeepers. So a great many of them are ongoing or sporadic clients of The Road Home or other providers of temporary or emergency shelter.

As the folks from the best-known and most talked about homeless shelter explained to the Tribune's Editorial Board the other day, the efforts made at The Road Home and by other caring people actually have a pretty good rate of finding people real housing.

But for every one who leaves the shelter for an apartment, more come in. There just isn't enough affordable housing out there for people who need it, even those who have case management or financial assistance.

Maybe it's too simplistic to say that the valley's housing boom is creating more homeless but, even if it isn't cause-and-effect, it's the same result.

I do know that, during my four years walking the main streets of poverty-stricken, rust-belt Buffalo, N.Y., I saw nary a panhandler. Life could be rough. But housing was cheap.

Smart folks working with The Urban Institute and the National Housing Conference have run the numbers and determined that no city can expect the market to provide enough affordable housing units on its own.

Even if some do-gooder or urban renewal authority would pony up some tax breaks or weed-covered vacant lots for free, housing projects that charge what working-class people can afford to pay just aren't profitable. With all the land costs, interest, maintenance and such, no developer can build — because no bank will finance — a building where units rent for what so many people can afford.

What that means is that some level of government, channeling taxpayer money and philanthropic efforts, is going to have to use tax breaks, charged, forgiven or refunded impact fees or outright gifts if there is to be any hope at all of facing our homelessness problem.

World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle (regrettably, no kin) wrote of the soldiers suffering from trench foot who were told by the medics to keep dry. Which, he said, was liking telling the insomniac that what he needed was more sleep.

The Salt Lake Valley needs more affordable homes, or the problem of homelessness will never be cracked. If the private market can't do it, the public sector must.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, often wonders if he really needs room for so much stuff.