Public policy and public perception have long linked the road to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction.
but new research The largest and most comprehensive survey of California’s homeless population in decades was released Tuesday, showing another cause of much of the street crisis is insecurity among the working poor, especially black and brown seniors. turned out to be in extreme poverty.
“These are the elderly who have lost their homes,” Dr. Margot Kuschel told me. She is the principal investigator for UCSF’s Benioff Her Homelessness and Housing Initiative study, which was conducted at the request of state health officials.
“They were basically living very poorly, but when they turned 50, something happened,” Kuschel said. Divorce, the death of a loved one, illness, or even reduced hours at work—something that set off a downward spiral that “just blew up” their lives, says Kuschel.
Kuschel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on the streets are over the age of 50. It also found that 7% of all homeless adults, whether single or in a family, were older than her 65 years old.
And 41% of older single Californians They hadn’t been homeless until they were 50, never a day in their lives.
If it doesn’t cause at least a little fear and empathy in your heart, then you’re either a big shot or a trust fund baby who’s never had a hard time paying bills. We see stories like the San Francisco story of the average homeless as a drug tourist dropping into a city too progressive for good fentanyl and lax laws, or unable to fend for themselves due to mental illness. It’s as much as I want to see someone who has become. , the truth is simpler, and far more devastating: As Californians age, home prices are soaring.
We’ve reached a point where homelessness becomes a real threat across the Golden State when income inequality rises and we’re too old to work. In California, there are only 24 affordable housing units available for every 100 ultra-low-income individuals, defined as less than 30% of his regional median income.
Thus, acquiring and maintaining permanent housing has become, as the report states, an ugly game of musical chairs in which too many people are left standing when the music stops.
“What people should know is that there are experts on the street,” Dede Hancock told me. She is a member of the study’s Lived Experience Advisory Board.
“The middle class is falling into the lower class,” Hancock said. “People who work every day live in their cars.”
Hancock, who earned a degree in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, owned both a home and a rental property before he became homeless in 2006. She said she lost her job as an administrative assistant at the nonprofit after pointing out her financial discrepancies and filed a wrongful dismissal claim.
However, the loss of the job started a spiral that eventually led to the loss of both fortunes. She and her son moved into her mother’s house, but within months her mother died of pancreatic cancer. She was unable to repay the loan and ended up losing her property.
One loss leads to another.
Her 12-year-old son came to live with a football coach, and she began sleeping in a warehouse where she kept remnants of her lost life. But she finally ended up on the street two weeks before her 2009 Thanksgiving. She remained homeless for seven years until she was able to apply for early Social Security at age 62.
“Sadly, in those seven years, no one asked me why I was homeless or why I was homeless,” Hancock told me.
And like many inequalities, race is also a big factor. Kuschel found that more than a quarter of his subjects surveyed were black, while only 6% of all Californians were black. Native Americans also make up the majority of the homeless population.
These facts are shameful and should change both the story we tell ourselves about California’s 171,000 homeless people and how we solve this crisis.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t mental illness crises on the streets, or that drug use isn’t a problem. Mental illness and substance use are clearly troubling pieces of the puzzle, as is our terrible job of helping people get back on their feet in prison and out of prison. The study found that one in five people interviewed became homeless after being incarcerated.
Just over a quarter of the people Kuschel’s team interviewed had a mental illness severe enough to require hospitalization at some point in their lives. This is a sign that our mental health care system is irrationally deficient as we know it. That’s why initiatives like CARE Court are important to provide alternative avenues for people with severe mental illness.
Kuschel said there is a perception that most people on the streets are using drugs, but “not everyone is using drugs.” Only about one-third said they regularly used stimulants, the most common drugs reported.
But Kuschel has found that financial instability is a tipping point, even for those with these other factors.
She found that many elderly people living on the streets have been employed most of their lives in physically demanding jobs such as waitressing, warehouse work, and construction. The types of jobs our economy depends on. Workers are easily replaced and frequently replaced.
So did Tony, a homeless man I met in Sacramento last week. He says he made it to the tent after a “storm of bad luck”. He asked me not to give his last name, but he told me his story. He was born in the San Fernando Valley and went to Sacramento to be with his girlfriend. He had a job in the transportation industry, but his license was stripped in 2018 for a traffic violation and never revoked. He then had to break up with his girlfriend and move out of her apartment.
“If you lose your job, you lose everything,” he tells me, standing under a row of shady plane trees on the road that separates the wealthy district from the encampment district.
“Too much money for one side [of the street] And the other is not enough, ”he said.
The study took a snapshot of both rural and urban homelessness across eight California counties, including Los Angeles, surveyed approximately 3,200 people, and conducted 365 in-depth interviews. The researchers found this result to be true regardless of whether the person was homeless in one of the major cities or lived in a less populated northern or eastern county.
Kuschel and her team also found another fact that dispels the myth. Most of the homeless people on the streets of California are Californians. Conservative commentators love to yell that the lazy homeless are flocking to the state in search of an easier life, but “we must stop this myth that people are pouring into California. said Kuschel. “It’s not true.”
According to Kuschel’s research, nine out of 10 people have lost their last home in California, and three-quarters live in the same county where they last had a place to call home.
As an aside, does compassion require a specific zip code? Most of the money that cities and counties spend on housing and homelessness comes from state and federal governments, not local coffers. These dollars do not have a string indicating their actual origin.
Kuschel said her findings are a wake-up call that while access to substance use treatment and rebuilding the mental health care system are urgently needed for some homeless populations, housing is the only solution for the homeless. said it should. We must build not only affordable housing, but also housing for the extremely low-income, she said. And we must do better through rent subsidies and other direct interventions to keep people living in the housing they have when life is hard.
Because if we can get people out of homelessness as soon as possible, more and more people can’t afford the rent because it’s too high. She found that the average income of people in her six months before becoming homeless was her $960.
Poor people need stable housing. To her credit, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is taking it from there. My colleagues Ruben Vives and Doug Smith recently said that Bass found permanent homes for more than 4,300 homeless people, and temporary homes for thousands more, in his first six months in office. reported. Her plans may be imperfect, but she has the right goals.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed started to crack down The Tenderloin has had problems arresting people for crimes such as public drunkenness, detaining them for several hours and then throwing them back on the streets. So far, none of the detainees have responded to offers of treatment. It makes sense because imprisonment doesn’t build a lot of trust.
Such short-term solutions would further marginalize people, leaving them invisible but still destitute, Kuschel warned.
My final stats are this. Less than half of those living on the streets receive formal assistance to obtain housing. Despite all our efforts, Kushel said there is a huge gap between the amount of intervention the government perceives it is providing and the extent to which it is actually reaching people. .
It’s not clear why, but it may be because aid is concentrated in shelters and hard-hit camps, missing homeless people who are quietly hiding, she said.
So did Ivan Dixon, 53, whom I spoke to in an alleyway in Sacramento. He said he was kicked out of the house by his father when he was 14, became homeless, and lived with a group of underground hip-hop dancers until he retired from the scene in old age.
When I asked him if he wanted housing, he looked at me like I was stupid.
“Of course it is,” he told me. But he says that being homeless means “no one’s friend.” He said he had not yet received an offer of help. But he also tries to avoid people, moving nightly to avoid being a “target” of both violence and the police.
“It’s just being on the street,” he told me.
But for old people it is not life.
