Article link (paywalled): https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-20/homeless-crisis-housing-californians-older-seniors-study
Excerpts:
Public policy and common perception have long tied the road to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction.
But a new study out Tuesday — the largest and most comprehensive investigation of California’s homeless population in decades — found another cause is propelling much of the crisis on our streets: the precarious poverty of the working poor, especially Black and brown seniors.
Kushel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on our streets are over the age of 50. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over 65.
And 41% of those older, single Californians had never been homeless — not one day in their lives — before the age of 50.
“What people need to know is there are professionals on the street,” DeDe Hancock told me. She’s a member of the lived experience advisory council for the study.
“People who are middle income are dropping to low,” Hancock said. “People working every day are living in cars.”
And though Kushel points out that the perception is that most people on the street are using drugs, “it’s not everybody,” she said. Only about a third said they were regular users of meth — the most common drug reported.
But Kushel found that even for people with those other factors, financial instability was the tipping point.
She discovered that of the older people living on the streets were employed for most of their lives, often in physically demanding jobs such as waitressing, warehouse work or construction. The kind of jobs our economy depends on, where workers are easily replaced and often are.
“Only” a third on meth? Jfc that’s high.
There are a lot of reasons people end up homeless. One specific drug being involved in a third of cases is huge.
Is meth a cause or do people who become homeless eventually look to meth as an escape from their life circumstances? I suspect that it’s probably a bit of both.
It’s likely a mix, but life circumstances are almost certainly going to be the cause for most. Living on the streets is hellish, of course people are going to look for some temporary escape
I know my personal experience isn’t statistical proof of anything, but I’ve known a couple of people who started using meth, then their life fell apart. I don’t know anyone whose life fell apart first and started using meth later.
From everyone I’ve come across addicted to something like that it’s always been life circumstances spiraling out of control that pushed them to it. The study itself acknowledges that “Nearly one quarter (24%) noted that substance use currently them health, legal, or financial problems.”
The 31% number specifically is in the following context: “Many participants reported using drugs and alcohol to help them cope with the circumstances of homelessness.”
