Mr. Resnikoff is policy manager for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. BERKELEY, Calif. �

It’s Hard to Have Faith in a State That Can’t Even House Its People

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2021-07-30 18:00:02

Mr. Resnikoff is policy manager for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Even if you don’t live in California, you’ve probably seen the pictures of tents lining Venice Beach. Or maybe you’ve seen photographs of Oakland’s sprawling homeless encampments, or the crowds of people living on the street in Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood. Those images, while stark, do not come close to capturing the scope of the state’s homelessness crisis.

Numbers come a little closer. California is home to nearly 12 percent of the country’s total population but, as of January 2020, 28 percent of its unhoused population, according to federal statistics. More than half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population resides in California.

All told, the federal government’s most recent “point in time” count tells us that 161,548 Californians were homeless on the night the count was conducted in early 2020, 113,660 of whom were unsheltered — and this was before the pandemic.