BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE AND ELIJAH WOLFSON
GOOD QUESTION
PEOPLE DON’T USUALLY BECOME HOMELESS SUDDENLY. It’s a chutes-and-ladders process, with lots of chutes and hardly any ladders. A large new statewide study done by the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative takes a closer look at the period just before homelessness, by asking a representative sample of almost 3,200 homeless people from all over the state about the chutes they fell into, and what would have helped. (Marc and Lynne Benioff, funders of the UCSF initiative, are also co-chairs and owners of TIME.) The study, published on June 20, is the largest of its kind since the 1990s.
Some of the findings were unsurprising: in the state with the nation’s largest homeless population, people are unhoused because they don’t have enough money, or have endured trauma—a quarter of all survey participants had experienced sexual violence—and their lives and health and safety get much worse once homelessness strikes. But some of the report’s data run counter to popular perception: for example, most homeless people were not from out of state, contrary to the myth that homeless people move to California for the weather and policies. The median length of homelessness at the time of the survey was nearly two years.
The study’s lead author, Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UCSF, says there’s a “doom loop” of homelessness, where people have jobs that don’t cover living expenses, so they lose their homes, and the resulting instability makes it harde
