🏡💚 Homelessness and climate crises converge in CA
November 10th, 2023
Homelessness is one of the greatest indignities of our society, and the scale of the crisis in California is staggering. According to the state auditor, Californians make up 12% of the total U.S. population but 28% of its homeless population and 51% of its unsheltered homeless. California has the largest homeless population in the country, with estimates of 172,000 people experiencing homelessness almost certainly an undercount.
We also know that climate change hits the most vulnerable the hardest. As climate disasters become more frequent and intense, we are starting to see the ways in which marginalized communities bear the greatest impacts. For example, historically redlined communities face a greater risk of flooding compared to non-redlined communities. We also are witnessing the ways that climate change uniquely and disproportionately impacts people experiencing homelessness. As Katie League from the National Health Care for the Homeless Council stated in this LA Times article, “With any environmental crisis, people experiencing homelessness experience it first, they experience it worst, and they experience it longest.”
Reports show that heat-related deaths have increased as a result of more extreme heat and increased homelessness because of the particular vulnerability of people who are unsheltered. State data shows from 2017 to 2021, 13% of California hospitalizations involving a primary diagnosis of heat-related illness came from people experiencing homelessness, despite them making up less than half a percent of the state’s population.
Climate disasters are also destroying homes and displacing people, threatening increased precarity and ongoing harms even after the disaster has “passed.” The climate crisis fuels the housing crisis, and becomes a threat multiplier to those already most vulnerable.
At the same time, we also know that the severe shortage of affordable housing — particularly housing that is affordable to people with the lowest incomes — is the primary driver of California’s homelessness crisis. One study released this year showed that at least 90% of adults who are experiencing homelessness in the state became homeless while living in California due primarily to the dire lack of affordable housing.
Governor Newsom’s own Statewide Housing Plan calls for 1 million new affordable units by 2030. The problem is, there’s no actual ‘plan’ of how to get there.
That’s why the California Green New Deal Coalition has joined a growing number of housing, tenant, and community groups calling for green social housing. We need a massive public investment in permanently affordable housing solutions that can meet the scale and urgency of the crises we face. And we think that green social housing can be one of the major pieces of a comprehensive and holistic approach to getting to (at least) a million affordable units by 2030.
A man pushes a cart near downtown Fresno on a 108-degree day. Credit: KQED
WHAT WE’RE READING
Unhoused Californians Are Living on the 'Bleeding Edge' of Climate Change (KQED) — article and episode of KQED’s podcast Sold Out: Rethinking Housing in America
How the Gemeindebau Made Vienna the Capital of Public Housing (Bloomberg)
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