A New Study Paints a Different Picture of Homelessness in California

There are a lot of myths about people who are homeless in California: They’re from another state. They don’t want a job. They don’t want a home.

A sweeping study published this morning by the University of California, San Francisco, paints a different picture, one of people who were working and living in poverty in the state until they suddenly lost their homes. Not knowing where to turn, they ended up on the street, where they endure violence and poor health as they try for years to climb back to stability.

“Something goes wrong, and then everything else falls apart,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the university. “Everything in their life gets worse when they lose their housing: their health, their mental health, their substance use.”

She likened it to “a personal doom loop.”

California has struggled for years with severe income inequality, high living costs and a lack of affordable housing, and the state now has more than 171,000 people who are homeless — 30 percent of the national total. The new study found that they tend to be older than average and are disproportionately likely to be Black or Native American.

“This is a problem of this toxic combination of deep poverty and high housing costs,” Kushel said. “We’re a state, like every state in this country, that has a lot of very poor people, and we just don’t have the housing for them.”

Kushel and her team focused on eight counties around the state that reflect a diversity of experiences, rural and urban. For about a year starting in October 2021, they visited encampments and other areas to survey 3,200 adults, and then interviewed 365 of them for up to an hour, sometimes in 110-degree heat.

The researchers were guided throughout by people who used to be homeless, like Claudine Sipili, whose yearlong episode began after a divorce. She coached the researchers on how to temper their eager data collection with conversational graces that made people feel comfortable. “It mattered a lot to me that this was done in the most dignifying way possible,” Sipili, 44, said.

The undertaking began in 2019 when Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary for health and human services, asked Kushel to see how state policies were affecting people on the street. They wondered not only about who was using California’s services, but also about whom the state was overlooking.

Most interviewees had forestalled their descent into homelessness by doubling up with friends or relatives, only to have those arrangements fall apart. Those who had owned homes often lost them quickly when their income fell. Time and again, people told the researchers that they didn’t know they were going to lose their housing until a few days before it happened.

Researchers then asked what help they sought.

“People were like, ‘What? What help?’” Kushel said. “That was heartbreaking.”

Nearly everyone the researchers spoke to wanted a permanent home again, and nearly half were actively trying to get a job. Most said that an extra $300 a month would have helped them avoid homelessness, and could also help them end it.

Sipili said she hoped people who have never been homeless will see the humanity in the study data and will feel compelled to improve the broader system serving people who are unhoused.

“They assign the blame to the person instead of looking at the system side of it,” she said.

Aidan Gardiner is a news assistant for the Standards department and has been working on homelessness and housing features for the Headway initiative at The Times.

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