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Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here? You can read the report here, an executive summary here, and a transcript of the report being discussed on the Ezra Klein Show here.
Released in June, it’s a statewide study on homelessness in California, the largest of its kind in some thirty years. It’s built on “nearly 3,200 participants, selected intentionally to provide a representative sample, and weighted data to provide statewide estimates. To augment survey responses, we recruited 365 participants to participate in in-depth interviews”. No question as to the state of focus: California is just over a tenth of the American population but nearly a third of its homeless population and nearly half of the unsheltered homeless population.
Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot. This also aligns with the finding that only about a third of the homeless even sought out government services, suggesting that most people are not taking advantage of whatever unique government services for the homeless California offers (which aren't good anyway). This overall makes some common sense imo - if you’re so broke you don’t have somewhere to live then your options for travel are likely limited as well.
The paper is interesting as a resource in its own right, but I think it’s most useful combined with the claims made in a book referenced in the Ezra Klein discussion of the report: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.”
The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness. For those who claim that homelessness is mostly a reflection of insanity and addiction, researchers point out that those things are frequently worse in other states with less severe homeless problems (correlations available in the hyperlink).
For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%). The only thing California performs worse than West Virginia on is, predictably, housing costs. Or why does San Francisco, with a poverty rate of 11.4%, have such a worse homelessness problem (0.95%) than much poorer cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, all of which have poverty rates more than twice as high around 23% and homelessness rates around only 0.27%? The clearest answer is the most straightforward: San Francisco is simply twice as expensive to live in (a studio apartment in SF is little over $2k vs a little over 1k for the other three cities). This also lines up with the survey responses, with 89% of respondents saying housing costs were a barrier to them finding housing.
This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens. Jerusalem Demsas compares this to a game of musical chairs: as you take away chairs one by one steadily the slower and weaker kids will find themselves without a place to sit. But if you don’t have enough chairs / are going through a severe housing shortage, of course you’re gonna have a worse chairlessness problem then elsewhere, even if their kids are slower and weaker.
And once you’re out, it can be very hard to get back on your feet. Your credit history is gonna be terrible, as is your appearance. Maybe you live in your car for a while but then it gets impounded because you have nowhere legal to park it and can’t pay for the tickets. Then you’ve lost your shelter as well as your ability to go to a job. From there you’re really in the streets, which is scary - some people may take uppers due to fear of being asleep in public where people can hurt you or steal from you, and thus pick up addictions. Things spiral very fast from bad to worse.
Taken together, these suggest early intervention and a clear policy prescription to build more housing and do what can be done to lower costs - not because every disheveled person on the street is a fresh-faced suburban homeowner waiting to happen, but specifically the opposite - that every poor or unstable person living on the cusp of not being able to afford where they stay bears the risk that it’ll be much harder for them to bounce back from a fall than to sustain where they are.
Interested to hear what other people thought.
This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed, which could even have been preceded by other homeless stints. Elsewhere the report states 34% were born outside of California. I doubt 34% of the homeless in WV were born in other states.
On top of that, these numbers don't start with the problematic homeless population most people are interested in. If I am reading this right, 21% of them have cars.
Yeah, the relevance of the stat is that homeless people aren't traveling to California for warm weather / permissible legal regimes, they just become homeless in the areas where they already live. This also raises the relevance of California specific factors like housing costs since these people didn't become homeless under a different state government then switch states, confusing the stats. As @huadpe says, about a third born in other states is fairly representative for a normal Californian anyway.
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One of the major problems win any homelessness related study or homeless census is that they only interact with the homeless in shelters and the most agreeable ones on the street. The ones in super-camps in the woods or parks are beyond the resources of most organizations and cities to locate, let alone survey. Additionally, the homeless are obviously highly mobile and move around a city throughout the day, so visiting a particular freeway overpass camp won't capture data about any one in a food tent, public library or a block over panhandling. I don't see why this particular paper is supposed to have solved these sampling issues.
This. There are people that live mostly "normal" lives and live in their cars or even in the woods. They're clean, showered, hold down jobs. I've heard of undergrads doing this as well as people with blue collar jobs.
I mean, I'm speaking to my experience in Austin, where you go half a mile from downtown and any undeveloped wood will have a massive 10-20 person camp complete with literally tons of trash and thousands of used needles. This is a hazard that comes up in many new construction projects. For commercial work, it gets dozered into a dumpster or buried on site. For state work, it usually turns into a huge health and environmental hazard requiring more consultants and specialists to document and remove these materials (the new TxDOT campus was delayed for almost a year over this issue).
So in my experience, these kinds of camps are some of the worst for drug abuse and theft just generally the most negative kinds of homeless. But it's also a good point that plenty of semi-functional people don't his as well. Hell, I considered doing this in college to save on rent.
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