Government policy and general perception have long linked the path to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction.

But a new study released Tuesday, the largest and most comprehensive survey of California’s homeless population in decades, found another driver driving much of the crisis on our streets: the precarious poverty of the working poor, especially black and brown. seniors.

“These are old people losing their homes,” says Dr.

Margot Kushel told me. She is the principal investigator of the study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, conducted at the request of state health officials.

“They were actually tapping very poor, and something happened somewhere after age 50,” Kushel said. That a divorce, a loved one dying, an illness, even a reduction in hours at work, triggered a downward spiral and their lives “just exploded,” as Kushel puts it.

Kushel and her team found that nearly half were single

homeless

adults living on the street are over 50 years old. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over the age of 65.

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

If that doesn’t instill at least a little fear and empathy in your heart, you’re either a mogul or a trust fund baby who’s never had a hard time paying the bills. As much as we would like the average homeless person to descend into overly progressive cities as a drug tourist for the good fentanyl and lax laws, as the San Francisco story goes, or someone whose mental illness makes it impossible for them to live without help, the truth simpler and far more devastating: As Californians age, they are priced out of their homes.

We’ve come to the point of income inequality where if you’re older and unable to work, homelessness is a real threat throughout the Golden State. For every 100 extremely low-income people

California, the state,

defined as making less than 30% of the area’s median income, there are only 24 affordable homes available.

That makes obtaining and maintaining permanent housing an ugly game of musical chairs, as the report states,

in which

standing too much when the music stops.

“What people need to know is that there are professionals on the street,” DeDe Hancock told me. She serves on the lived experience advisory board for the study.

“Middle-income people fall too low,” Hancock said. “People who work every day live in cars.”

Before becoming homeless in 2006, Hancock owned both a home and a rental property. She lost her job as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit after pointing out a financial discrepancy, she said, and filed a wrongful termination complaint.

But the loss of her job started that spiral that ended with the loss of both of her properties. She and her son moved in with her

mother

home, but within a few months her mother died of pancreatic cancer. She eventually lost that property too when she couldn’t pay off a loan for it.

One loss leads to the next.

Her 12-year-old son moved in with his soccer coach, and she began sleeping in a storage room where she kept the remains of her lost life. But she ended up on the streets two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2009. She remained homeless for seven years until she was able to apply for early Social Security at age 62.

“The sad thing is that in those seven years no one ever asked me why or how I became homeless,” Hancock told me.

And like so much of our inequality, race is a big factor. Kushel found that more than a quarter of those surveyed identified as black, while only 6% of Californians overall are black. Native Americans are also overrepresented in our homeless population.

Those facts are embarrassing and should change both the stories we tell ourselves about California’s 171,000 homeless people and how we solve the crisis.

That’s not to say there isn’t also a crisis of mental illness on our streets, or that substance use isn’t a problem. Mental illness and substance use are clearly disturbing pieces of the puzzle, as is the terrible work we do helping people to fix themselves when they get out of our prisons and jails. The survey found that 1 in 5 interviewees became homeless after being in prison.

Just over a quarter of the people interviewed by Kushel’s team had a mental illness serious enough to require hospitalization at some point in their lives, a sign of what we all know our system unscrupulously inadequate for mental health care. That’s why initiatives like CARE Court are critical to providing people with severe mental illness with an alternative path.

And while Kushel points out that the perception is that most people take drugs on the street, “it’s not everyone,” she said. Only about a third said they were regular users of meth, the most common drug.

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

She found that many of the older people who lived on the streets spent most of their lives working, often in physically demanding jobs such as waiting, warehouse work or construction. The kind of jobs our economy depends on, where workers can and often are easily replaced.

Such was the case for Tony, a homeless person I met in Sacramento last week, who reportedly ended up in a tent after “a storm of bad luck.” He asked me not to use his last name, but he shared his story. He was born in the San Fernando Valley and

went came

to Sacramento to be with a friend. He had a job in transportation but lost his driver’s license due to a traffic violation he never solved in 2018. Then he broke up with the girlfriend and had to leave her apartment.

“After you lose your job, you lose everything,” he told me, standing under a row of shady sycamore trees on a road that separates a wealthy neighborhood from a neighborhood full of camps.

“There is too much money on one side [of the street] and on the other hand not enough,” he said.

The study used eight counties in California, including Los Angeles, to create a snapshot of rural and urban homelessness, surveying nearly 3,200 people and conducting 365 in-depth interviews. Researchers found that the results held up regardless of whether a person had a homeless home in one of our major cities or in our less populated northern and eastern provinces.

Kushel and her team found another fact that debunked the myth: most

homeless

people

homeless

on California

‘s

streets are Californians. While conservative pundits love to shout about lazy homeless people flocking to the state for an easy life, “we need to stop these stories of people pouring into California,” Kushel said. “It’s not true.”

Kushel found that 9 out of 10 people have lost their last home in California and three quarters live in the same county where they last had a place to call home.

other

a

side note: does compass need a specific zip code? Most of the money cities and counties use for housing and homelessness comes from the state and federal government, not the local treasury. Those dollars don’t come with where are you really from strings.

Kushel said her findings should be a wake-up call

while access to substance use and the reconstruction of mental health care are urgent for a segment of the homeless population

,

the only solution to homelessness is housing. We need to build not only affordable housing, but housing for extremely low-income people, she said. And we need to do better at keeping people in the housing they have, through housing subsidies and other direct interventions, when life hits them in the face.

Because as fast as we can get people out of homelessness, the rent is too high and more and more people can’t afford it. She found that in the six months before becoming homeless, people’s average income was $960

dollars

.

So impoverished people need stable housing, which is the premise LA Mayor Karen Bass uses, to her credit. That’s what my colleagues Ruben Vives and Doug Smith recently reported

during her first six months in office

Bass has found permanent housing for more than 4,300 people living on the streets

in her first six months in the office,

and temporary housing for thousands of others. Her plans may be imperfect, but they serve the right purpose.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has begun a crackdown on the beef tenderloin infestation, arresting people for crimes including public intoxication, taking them into custody for a few hours and then throwing them back onto the streets. No detainee has so far accepted treatment, which is not surprising as incarceration is not a huge confidence builder.

Such short-term fixes drive people further to the margins, Kushel warned, making them invisible but no less needy.

The last statistic I’ll give you is this: less

more than half of the people living on the street have received formal help in finding a home. Despite all our efforts, there is a huge discrepancy between how much intervention the government thinks it is providing and how much people are actually reaching.

said

Hug

said. While Although

the reasons for that are unclear, she said it may be in part because the aid is focused on shelters or troubled encampments and misses the quiet, hidden homeless.

Such is the case for Ivan Dixon, 53, whom I spoke to in a Sacramento alley. He’s been homeless since his father kicked him out at 14, he said, and lived with a group of underground hip-hop dancers until he disappeared from that scene.

When I asked him if he wanted housing, he looked at me

like it’s fun

I was stupid.

“Of course I do,” he told me. But he said being homeless means you are “nobody’s friend.” He has not offered help, he said. But he also tries to prevent people from moving every night to avoid becoming a “target” of both violence and the police.

“That’s just being on the street,” he told me.

But it’s no life for an old man.