While Clark County and other communities work to reduce homelessness, the issue persists. So does a lack of understanding about the causes that result in unhoused people setting up tents in public spaces or sleeping on sidewalks.
Along those lines, a couple recent news items bear examination to help local residents understand the issue and deal with it more effectively.
One involves the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, led by the University of California San Francisco. The study included 3,200 questionnaires and 365 in-depth interviews of homeless people, collected from October 2021 to November 2022.
The last large study of homelessness in the United States, experts say, was conducted nearly 30 years ago. “It’s incredibly difficult to do representative studies of people experiencing homelessness, so the fact that this study was able to obtain a large and representative sample of adults experiencing homelessness in California is impressive,” Elizabeth Bowen, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo who studies the issue, told Vox.com.
Among the findings was how little notice people had before they became homeless. Those who had a rental lease or a mortgage reported a median of 10 days’ notice before losing their housing; those living with family or friends reported a median notice of one day.
Of course, the circumstances that led to that notification likely existed for some time. But the housing change can exacerbate difficult conditions, creating barriers to health care and employment and making it more difficult for people to escape homelessness.
Much of that is predictable. But the study also batters a myth that surrounds public perceptions of homelessness. It found that 90 percent of the respondents lived in the state when they became homeless; 75 percent were living in the same county as their last secure housing.
That echoes a recent finding from The Seattle Times. The newspaper reports that 60 percent to 70 percent of King County’s homeless population reports living in the county when they became homeless. The county’s Homeless Management Information System says a vast majority of unhoused people report that their last stable housing was in Washington.
As Alison Eisinger of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness told The Times: “The notion that people are flocking to — fill in the blank: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego — because it’s a great place to struggle to make ends meet is untrue.”
That follows similar studies from throughout the country, and it provides insight for stemming the tide of homelessness.
Critics like to suggest that unhoused people come to cities along the West Coast because liberal governments provide copious public services. But data continue to rebuff that assertion. Locally, the Council for the Homeless says 81 percent of Clark County’s unhoused population lived here before becoming homeless.
Homelessness is a pressing problem that has multiple causes and creates multiple problems for communities. As Gov. Jay Inslee told The Columbian’s Editorial Board: “It is my belief that it is distressing to everyone to see this degradation that is going on in every urban area in the state, people living in squalor. That’s not acceptable in the state of Washington.”
Fixing that requires some agreement on the underlying facts — including a recognition that homeless people in our community are not newcomers. They are our neighbors — and they were before they became homeless.
