During the now decades-long homelessness crisis in California, one of those home truths has been that mental illness and addiction are the prime movers that cause so many tens of thousands in our cities to live unhoused.
Because a massive new study released last week out of the medical school at UC San Francisco has a different, simpler take, summed up by CalMatters in this way: “Losing income is the No. 1 reason Californians end up homeless — and the vast majority of them say a subsidy of as little as $300 a month could have kept them off the streets.”
“In the six months prior to becoming homeless, the Californians surveyed were making a median income of just $960 a month. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in California is nearly three times that … And though survey participants listed a myriad of reasons why they lost their homes, more people cited a loss of, or reduction in, income than anything else,” Marisa Kendall reports for CalMatters.