To better understand California’s homelessness and how to combat it, Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration requested for a study of the situation. This call resulted in a statewide research on the topic. Conducted by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI) at the University of California San Francisco between October 2021 and November 2022, the survey interviewed 3,200 unhoused people, ages 18 and older, across the state, including urban, rural, and suburban areas.
Read: General Solutions to Homelessness
Led by director Dr. Margot Kushel, the research’s findings contradict several persistent assumptions about people without homes in California, namely that most unhoused people come from outside the state to take advantage of its services, and also that homeless people are mostly young adults who prefer to live outside and don’t want help (which is stereotypical).
In actuality, 90% of the state’s homeless people lost their housing in the state, with 75% of them now living in the same county where they were last housed. Lastly, a good deal of California’s unhoused people get into homeless from institutions.
To sum it all up in this section, while the state government requested for the study, the study wasn’t funded by it.
