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The University of California San Francisco has put together one of the most comprehensive reports ever done regarding California’s homeless problem.
Released in late June by UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness is the largest study of its kind conducted since the mid-1990s.
Its findings are based on 3,200 surveys and 365 in-depth interviews, according to the woman who oversaw the project.
“Studying homelessness is logistically very difficult to do, and this is the first study of its kind since unsheltered homeless started to become a serious problem,” said Margaret Bushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative and the study’s principal investigator. “Our goal was to try to demystify homelessness a little bit, and find out its causes.”
Conducted from October 2021 to November 2022, the study in many ways paints a grim picture of homelessness in California, an ongoing problem that Gov. Gavin Newsom has called “a disgrace.” California’s homeless population – meaning anyone who experiences homelessness daily – is about 171,000, the study found.
The state, which makes up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, accounts for 30 percent of the country’s homeless population.
California’s homeless are also getting older, and racial minorities are overrepresented among those in the state with no place to live, according to the study.
The median age of those surveyed was 47 years old, with subjects’ ages ranging from 18 to 89 years old.
Thirty-five percent of those surveyed identified as Latino, 26 percent as African-American, and 12 percent as Native American/indigenous. Those numbers are higher than other ethnic groups, according to the survey.
Nearly 40 percent of those surveyed said they were homeless for the first time, and when people become homeless in California, they usually stay that way for a while.
Nine out of ten people surveyed had their last housing in California, while 75 percent said they lived in the last county in which they last had a home.
“That might not sound important, but it is,” said San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Jones, a member of the department’s eight-member Homeless Outreach and Proactive Enforcement (HOPE) program. “It means not many homeless people are coming from out of state to try and live in California.”
The median length of homelessness was 22 months, and 36 percent of those surveyed met U.S. government’s definition of chronic homelessness: anyone who has been living in a safe haven, emergency shelter or any place not intended for human habitation for at least one year.
“Being homeless for almost two years is a long time,” Bushel told a Sacramento podcast when the 93-page report was released. “Because housing in California is so expensive, and because it’s so disorienting to be homeless, anyone who falls into homelessness in California usually takes a long time to get out of it.”
About 20 percent of the people surveyed were in an institution – hospital, prison, drug treatment program, etc. The rest were in what the survey calls a “non-leaseholder situation”: already evicted, or had left their home after being threatened with eviction.
Often, those people were living with friends and family and often weren’t paying rent, the report states.
The common perception is that most people become homeless because of drug or alcohol addiction, or mental illness, and those are certainly factors. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said they’ve used illicit drugs, and 62 percent admitted to having been a “heavy drinker” for at least one period in their life, meaning they drank at least three times a week specifically to become intoxicated.
An overwhelming number – 82 percent – reported having experienced a “serious mental health problem,” while a little more than one-quarter said they had been in hospital at least once for a mental health condition.
But the biggest cause of homelessness in California is the state’s high cost of housing, particularly for people who rent.
Twenty-one percent of renters said loss of income was the main reason they lost their housing, and that a medical issue often contributed to that loss.
“California is an incredibly expensive state,” Bushel said. “People told us they got to a point where they couldn’t pay their rent. That’s what drove them out, and when they became homeless things got worse. They were in an even bigger hole.”
How state lawmakers respond to the Benioff Homeless study remains to be seen, but in the meantime, Sacramento is treating homelessness as one of the largest problems – maybe even the largest problem – now facing California.
In March, Newsom announced he was restoring the Homeless Housing, Assistance, and Prevention program after suspending it for a year, a move that makes available $1 billion for local jurisdictions to draw on so they can fight homelessness in their communities.
Newsom stopped the program in 2022 when local governments collectively said they would try to reduce their unsheltered homeless population by two percent, but he agreed to bring it back after those entities vowed to reduce all homelessness by 15 percent by 2025.
The governor also announced that 1,200 small homes in several jurisdictions to provide safe, interim housing and that people living in homeless encampments would be first in line for those dwelling places.
The Benioff Homeless study deserves credit for pointing out that homeless is caused by multiple factors, said Eric Gavin, an Upland resident and anti-homeless activist who has worked with Fontana and Upland to help them reduce their homeless populations.
“People think it’s all drugs and alcohol, and those are causes, but there are other causes as well,” said Gavin, who said he is writing a book on the origins of homelessness. “It’s good that they pointed that out.”
