Politics

Article link (paywalled): https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-20/homeless-crisis-housing-californians-older-seniors-study

Excerpts:

Public policy and common perception have long tied the road to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction.

But a new study out Tuesday — the largest and most comprehensive investigation of California’s homeless population in decades — found another cause is propelling much of the crisis on our streets: the precarious poverty of the working poor, especially Black and brown seniors.

Kushel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on our streets are over the age of 50. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over 65.

And 41% of those older, single Californians had never been homeless — not one day in their lives — before the age of 50.

“What people need to know is there are professionals on the street,” DeDe Hancock told me. She’s a member of the lived experience advisory council for the study.

“People who are middle income are dropping to low,” Hancock said. “People working every day are living in cars.”

And though Kushel points out that the perception is that most people on the street are using drugs, “it’s not everybody,” she said. Only about a third said they were regular users of meth — the most common drug reported.

But Kushel found that even for people with those other factors, financial instability was the tipping point.

She discovered that of the older people living on the streets were employed for most of their lives, often in physically demanding jobs such as waitressing, warehouse work or construction. The kind of jobs our economy depends on, where workers are easily replaced and often are.