By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
A few times in the past year, the question had been posed about how people go from being housed to being homeless. We learned a lot with the recent study out of the University of California, San Francisco.
And what we learned is that it was a process—but it was also a process that happened fast.
The study found, “The median monthly household income of participants in the six months prior to homelessness was $960.”
Given the cost of housing, that figure not surprisingly will make a lot of people vulnerable to becoming homeless because there is basically no margin for error at that income level.
Perhaps surprisingly they found that PRIOR to being homeless, the median monthly housing costs were $375 (in the danger area for sure).
However, they warn, “this statistic obscures an important point. Many participants were 
already living with family or friends (‘doubled up’) or living in informal arrangements without leases; others entered from a leaseholder arrangement and still others entered homelessness from institutional settings where they didn’t have housing costs.”
Nearly half then entered “homelessness from a non-leaseholder, non-institutional housing situation, 32% entered from a leaseholder arrangement, and 19% entered from an institutional setting.”
It continued, “Participants entering from non-leaseholder arrangements tended to have relatively low housing costs, but were staying in suboptimal—and impermanent—places, without legal protections. Many, if not most, had left formal leaseholding arrangements at some point before doubling up, but had forestalled homelessness through one or more non-leaseholding arrangements. Earlier, they had faced experiences similar to those who had left leaseholding arrangements. After losing that housing, they experienced a more gradual descent into homelessness, exhausting other options before entering homelessness.”
So no, they didn’t go from stable, secure housing to homelessness overnight. It was a gradual process.
The study found the median monthly income for non-leaseholders in the six months prior to homelessness was $950 while the median monthly income for leaseholders was about $1400. There was no margin for error even for that group, as they were paying an average of about $700 just on rent—half their income.
The study found, “Among non-leaseholders who paid rent, 57% were rent burdened (paying more than 30% of their income in rent) and 41% were severely rent burdened (paying more than 50% of their household income in rent).”
From this it should be obvious that what has happened is, as the cost of housing has gone up, the meager earnings of those on the low end of the scale have not kept up.
It seems to me that this data then suggests a few things—one, that we need more housing, and second, we need to do a better job of identifying people on the verge of becoming homeless and get them into supportive housing before it becomes chronic.
Important, however, is this fact: we actually know what works to both prevent homelessness and get people who are homeless back into stable housing.
As Jennifer Ludden of NPR explained this week, “experts tell me it’s not like programs to move people into housing don’t work.”
So why is the problem getting worse?
She explained, “The problem, they say, is that even more people keep losing housing because it is increasingly unaffordable. So nationwide, the places with the most homelessness are those where you have poverty and high housing costs.”
She referenced the UCSF study, and noted that Margot Kushel, who directed the study, explained that many described this as a “slow slide as they struggled to keep paying rent. They may have lost income, had their hours cut at work. Or some lost a job because of a health crisis, or the rent just went up.”
People didn’t go directly to the streets, as I describe above; instead, the first step was to move in relatives and friends.
Kushel explained that this eventually fails.
She said “we found that those relationships, when they fell apart, fell apart quickly. People only had one day’s warning. You know, when you’re the 10th person in a one-bedroom apartment, not that surprising that there would be conflict there. Or sometimes people just felt like they could no longer impose.”
The discussion on NPR highlights a key problem here.
Ludden, for example, notes the “financial disconnect” — “for the people who became homeless in that survey, their median monthly household income was $960. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in California is 1,700.”
Some will argue that this is a wealth problem, not a housing problem.
I would argue it’s the confluence of poverty with a housing problem.
But here’s the thing—when I was a student really not all that long ago, the cost of housing was far less. You could rent three-bedroom apartments in town for less than $1000 a month, and now single-bedroom apartments are much more than that. Income levels, especially on the low end, simply have not been able to keep up.
NPR cites Steve Berg with the National Alliance to End Homelessness who notes that “zoning laws, some of which date back to segregation, by the way, make it really hard to build apartments in residential neighborhoods.”
He told NPR, “You hear of places that—where they’re trying to build new, affordable apartment buildings. And the powers that be in the city don’t want to have it. You know, neighbors will say, we don’t want low-income people living here. And they’ll stop the housing from being built.”
But there is another problem, “Berg also says housing that’s billed as affordable and does get built, it’s not always cheap enough for the lowest-income families, and he says more of it needs to be.”
This gets back to a point I raised last week: we need to expand things like federal housing subsidies.
Ludden pointed out, “Right now, only 1 in 4 people who qualify actually get them, and they’re really hard to use. In fact, many landlords refuse to accept housing vouchers, so there could be more programs to help people find places that do.”
Kushel argues that a solution is to “catch people at risk of becoming homeless” before they end up on the streets.
That’s from those who responded to the survey in the first place, and presumably answered the survey accurately. The rest were unwilling or unable to communicate, hidden from sight, or threatened the poll-taker – who then “skedaddled”.
If that was true, Ahterton and Tiburon would have far more homeless per capita than places like Sacramento. And yet, the former have “high housing costs” – but virtually no poverty or homelessness. In contrast, Sacramento has lower housing costs – but lots of poverty and homelessness.
Seems to me that “poverty” is not a component of some high-cost cities.
For that matter, I suspect that there’s cities or communities which have high poverty, but low homelessness. (The Clear Lake area comes to mind.)
Just an observation.
Or, they got kicked out, when their family or friends couldn’t tolerate the problems created by some of these folks – the same problems which ultimately led to homelessness. (Perhaps also a reason that their income was limited to $960/month – which may not have been from a job in the first place.)
Or, perhaps the place where they were “crashing” was occupied by someone who had the same problems that they do.
Ron O
Ah, so the solution to homelessness is “clean up your act on your own!” Such a great and useful insight to human nature. On one hand we have someone who professes he cares about fighting climate change and preserving ag land for the greater good, and on the the other hand telling the least among on us that their on their own for solving their most critical and intractable problems. Which one is the true self that will reveal himself?
Are you saying that the responses from half of the population aren’t valid because the other half didn’t respond?
As for what has forced people out of their homes, none of these people started out living in Atherton or Tiburon. Those residents have enough wealth to ride out adversity and they own their homes at a fixed mortgage payment. (My mother in law could never afford to buy her house near Santa Monica, and even the property taxes when reassessed would drive her out.) It’s the rising rents in big cities like Sacramento that have created the homeless crisis. Rents and housing prices are directly tied as closely interlinked markets.
I said no such thing.
This is what we call a “straw man” comment. (See, “I said no such thing”, above.)
We don’t even know if “half” responded, nor do we know how accurate the self-reported responses are.
But the survey itself shows that the average income of respondents was $960 per month. And yet, this is being described as a “housing issue”.
You seem to be claiming that housing prices have not risen in Atherton or Tiburon, and (also) seem to be “o.k.” with “reserving” those places for those wealthy-enough to pay those rising prices.
The latter of which you seem to have a “big problem” with in regard to Davis, despite it being quite inexpensive compared to those locales.
And how odd it is that the wealthiest-locales of all have “no responsibility” for homelessness, in your apparent view.
Nor do we know if, for example, children of those living in wealthy locales comprise at least a portion of the homeless population (e.g., getting kicked-out and cut-off by their parents).
It’s also interesting that you apparently believe that expensive locales have “no” rental housing, and are apparently also “o.k.” with that.
How does this relate to whatever point you’re trying to make? And by the way, didn’t you just essentially claim that expensive cities have “no rental housing”?
In contrast, rising rents in expensive locales have no impact?
Rents in Sacramento and San Francisco have been falling significantly, lately. Has there been a corresponding reduction in homelessness?
And what kind of living situation can $960/month provide, in regard to the self-reported average income of respondents? Do you actually think that “rising rental prices” is the biggest issue, here?