Homelessness in the Bay Area
It's driven by high rents
One force sets the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis apart: rent. Luis Melecio-Zambrano and Ethan Varian, San Jose Mercury News.
As public frustration over street homelessness has grown, the scale of human suffering has fueled criticism of a region known for both extraordinary wealth and progressive politics, raising an obvious question: Why is homelessness so bad here in the Bay Area?
A Bay Area News Group analysis compared Bay Area counties to 13 jurisdictions across the country, including coastal megacities, Midwestern metropolises, growing Sun Belt cities and other regions, to understand what is unique about the Bay Area.
The analysis found the Bay Area does not stand out for high levels of poverty, unemployment, substance use disorder or mental illness.
But in one category, the region was an outlier: rent. Every Bay Area county ranked in the top 1% of rental costs among counties nationwide.
What about weather?
An analysis of January temperatures around the country found no clear relationship between winter weather and homelessness. For example, Miami-Dade County, with January temperatures in the mid-60s, has a relatively low rate of homelessness, while New York City and Washington, D.C., have January temperatures in the 30s and high rates of homelessness.
Additionally, surveys of people experiencing homelessness in the Bay Area suggest that most became homeless in the county where they currently live: More than 4 in 5 in Santa Clara, Contra Costa and Sonoma counties and around 3 in 5 in San Francisco and Marin counties, according to county survey data from the most recent publicly available reports.
The Bay Area did, however, stand out in one category: rent.
In the most recent census data, median rents ranged from $2,200 to $2,800 a month in the Bay Area, dwarfing the national median of $1,471.
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