The UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI) released on September 12 a topic brief focused on unsheltered homelessness in California and two toolkits to help communities address encampments and rehouse unsheltered individuals.
The brief, Unsheltered Homelessness: Findings from the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, reveals that 78% of Californians experiencing homelessness are in unsheltered settings. Structural racism is a significant factor in homelessness, and data show that 72% of unsheltered Californians are people of color. Data also indicate that the population of unsheltered individuals in California continues to age, with the median age being 47 and that unsheltered individuals face extremely high rates of physical (40%) and sexual violence (11%). The data likewise highlight stark gender disparities in rates of sexual violence, with a quarter of cisgender women living outdoors reporting having experienced sexual violence.
According to the brief, twice as many unsheltered people (20%) entered homelessness from an institutional setting than those who were sheltered (11%). Nearly half of those living in outdoor settings (45%) and one third of those living in vehicles (32%) had had their belongings taken by a government agency or by the police in the last six months, and in in-depth interviews “participants described experiences of sweeps and frequent police contact, including losing essential belongings and incarceration.”
Almost all unsheltered people cited the lack of affordability as the biggest barrier to housing. Given this finding, BHHI urges policymakers to increase funding for affordable housing development, work with Continuum of Care programs to end homelessness, and provide increased mental health resources for unsheltered individuals. Additional recommendations include ensuring that services are culturally sensitive towards people of color, targeting older adults at high risk of homelessness, providing more housing resources for unsheltered homelessness among those coming from institutional settings, and protecting the civil and property rights of people experiencing homelessness, among other things.
Additionally, BHHI released two toolkits to help communities navigate the complex landscape of homelessness and connect unsheltered individuals to stable housing rather than displacing them through sweeps. The first toolkit, Encampment Resolution Guide, aims to help communities identify and assess encampments and provide complete resources to address them, focusing on housing people first and meaningfully reducing the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
The second toolkit, Encampment Prioritization Tool, is designed to support communities in prioritizing encampments and successfully resolving them. This tool outlines the factors taken into consideration in the Encampment Resolution Guide across various domains, including population needs, disorders, public health, location, and priorities, and provides an overall prioritization chart detailing how to prioritize resolving encampments effectively and successfully.
BHHI’s policy proposals and the implementation of the conclusions of the toolkits into approaches to encampment resolution are important steps toward addressing unsheltered homelessness and its detrimental short-term and long-term impacts.
Read the policy brief and find the toolkits at: https://tinyurl.com/yeynt5uf