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New study says housing costs the root cause of California's homelessness

Justin Sullivan
/
Getty Images

A statewide study released Tuesday is the largest survey of homeless adults in California since 1996. Ninety percent of participants in the representative study had been housed in California prior to becoming homeless, nearly half of them are over the age of 50, and African American and Native American people are overrepresented in the unhoused population.

The study, dubbed the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, began in October 2021. The study team administered more than 3,000 questionnaires and conducted 365 in-depth interviews in California, where nearly a third of the country’s unhoused people live. Margot Kushel is the director of the University of California San Francisco’s Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative and was the study’s principal investigator.

“There are a lot of very poor people, and there is very little housing that very poor people can afford,” Kushel said. “The solution to homelessness is housing.”

Based on the study’s findings, the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative team recommended six policy changes. First among them was to “increase access to housing affordable to extremely low-income households,” both by increasing the supply of affordable housing and by expanding rental subsidies.

— (A photo and audio documentary project produced as a companion piece to the study is available at unhousedca.org.)

Max Harrison-Caldwell is a summer intern at KALW and a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he is studying audio reporting and photojournalism. Before going back to school, he covered streets and public space for The Frisc. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Thrasher Magazine.