Adding Affordable Housing Is ‘Essential’ To Fixing California’s Homelessness Crisis, Study Finds

The main barrier to fixing California’s homelessness crisis is the massive shortage of affordable housing for people with very low incomes, and fixing that is “essential” to solving homelessness, according to a major new study of unhoused Californians.

That’s the top recommendation from the study, led by UC San Francisco and billed as the largest representative study of homelessness in the nation in 30 years.

The year-long study surveyed 3,200 unhoused people across the state, 365 of whom were interviewed in-depth. Using statistical analysis, researchers sought participants who would represent the state’s overall unhoused population.

“This is all about the disconnection between people’s incomes and housing costs,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, the study’s lead investigator, in an interview with LAist.

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“People were making less than $1,000 a month for their whole household in the months before they became homeless, and they just couldn't keep up with the housing costs,” added Kushel, who directs the university’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

“Band-Aids are good. You know, better than bleeding,” she said. “But what we really want to do is stop the bleed … There is no medicine as powerful as housing.”

As of this year, California has “only 24 units of housing available and affordable for every 100 extremely low-income households,” the study notes.

That’s a shortage of about 1 million units, said Kushel.

“This is going to take the involvement of every level of government,” she added, including local governments rethinking zoning rules that have limited construction of new housing.

In a statement, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said the report is an opportunity "to see the diversity in the population of those who are unhoused," and that she hopes it creates a sense of "urgency" to create housing and services to deal with homelessness.

Other key findings

Here are some of the other key findings:

• The state’s unhoused population is overwhelmingly Californian. Ninety percent of people reported losing their last housing in the state.
• California’s unhoused population is aging; nearly half of adults experiencing homelessness are over the age of 50. And almost half of those individuals had never been unhoused before age 50.
• The unhoused population is disproportionately Black, brown and Indigenous.
• Almost three-quarters reported experiencing physical violence in their lifetime, and about one-quarter reported experiencing sexual violence. Sexual violence was more common among cisgender women (43%) and much more common among transgender or nonbinary people (74%).
• Nearly half of unhoused people reported they were looking for work.
• A large majority (82%) “reported a period in their life where they experienced a serious mental health condition,” with slightly over one-quarter reported being hospitalized for a mental health condition.

Click here to read the study, and here for an executive summary.

The lack of substance abuse treatment a major problem

The study also found that 1 in 5 unhoused people who use substances reported that they wanted substance use treatment, but couldn’t get it.

People reported getting to a treatment center but being told there were no available beds and to come back in two weeks, Kushel said. Many also reported that drug treatment had rules that weren’t realistic for them.

“We just heard so many people telling us that when they tried to get help, the doors to that help were closed and then they lost their moment of opportunity,” she said.

And when people do get into drug treatment, Kushel said, they run into a problem when the program is over: There’s no housing.

“So they went back to the streets and then relapsed,” Kushel said.

“One of our recommendations is we need to up our game in both mental health and substance use treatment. We need to make it more accessible, more available," Kushel said. “What’s been shown is we need to start with the housing. Then, [on] Day 1 you offer the services. But if you demand the services first — first of all people can’t get to them. And secondly, they may not be ready, because what they’re saying is, ‘I need the safety and security of home.’”

People’s mental health and substance use issues get worse when they’re on the streets versus in housing, she added.

On the streets, “their belongings are getting stolen. They're too hot, they're getting rained on. They're terrified. They can't get their medicines. That's not a really good environment for people to get treatment,” Kushel said.

But when people are offered housing first, she said, “their use of substance abuse treatment goes way up compared to the people who were not offered housing.”

Recommendations

To address the housing crisis, the study recommends:

• Producing more housing that’s affordable to the lowest-income renters.
• Expanding rental subsidies like federal Housing Choice Vouchers.
• Making it easier for people to use housing subsidies by increasing housing navigation services and creating and enforcing anti-discrimination laws.

The study also calls for greater efforts to prevent people from falling into homelessness, with tools like financial support and legal assistance.

That can be done when people are leaving jails, prisons and drug treatment, and at places where people receive other services around health care, domestic violence and social services, the researchers wrote.

“I think this study shows just how devastating it is when you have lost that housing, how powerful the yearning for housing is,” Kushel said. “In some ways, it's a politically difficult problem. It will take resources. But in some ways, the answer is really simple, and we shouldn't make it harder than it is. People want to be housed.”