When it comes to places with large homeless populations, California has more homeless people than any other state. Estimates vary, but according to most sources, the population of people without homes in the state is over 130,000 and has been near that for a number of years now.
While it’s true that California has a larger overall population of people (with or without homes), it’s still quite obvious that this doesn’t entirely explain why so many people are homeless there. To put things into perspective, Texas has a homeless population that most estimates put at around 25,000. Texas’s population has historically been about 45-50% smaller than California, yet their homeless population numbers have consistently been over 400% less than California’s.
So why do so many homeless people live in California or go there when they fall on hard times? What exactly is it that causes them to stay there or attracts them from other states? Well, there isn’t just one simple answer to that and opinions vary.
Those who have lived in a number of different states can easily see some of the major factors that can play a role in the psyche of homeless people and why they like California so much. Here’s some of the more prominent factors that are probably playing a huge role in California’s popularity with homeless people.
Great Weather
California is known worldwide for having some of the most excellent weather in the United States. Although it can get very cold (it snows in some areas) and extremely hot (California has deserts), the weather is still very mild in most areas throughout the year and it doesn’t rain as often as in other areas of the country.
I was actually surprised by how cold the ground had become in the middle of the night when I was homeless and first had to sleep outside. But, it would have been much colder in many other areas outside the cities where I was at.
Also, many large cities in California are located in valleys. Valleys in California with large populations include Silicon, Sacramento, Central, San Joaquin, San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. These valleys often serve as a minor form of protection from rain as it normally does rain less in areas surrounded by mountains, even smaller ones.
This is a perfect situation for homeless people who need to sleep outside because even on the coldest days, most people can still keep warm if they have a tent and a blanket. This is completely different than in many northern states where people can actually freeze to death trying to camp outside in a tent or where the ground is constantly damp from precipitation.
The reasons that homeless people would choose to sleep outside can vary, from not wanting to deal with rules in shelters to simply not having the money to pay shelters after the initial free period of stay.
More Social Programs
People often refer to California as a “nanny state” because it’s well-known for providing many social services to people who are poor or struggling. This reputation is somewhat deserved, although the term nanny state is usually used in a negative way to describe California. If you’re homeless in the United States, there’s probably no better place to be so than in the golden state of the west.
Some social programs that are offered federally have even more options and benefits in California than they do in other states. A perfect example is EBT (food stamps), which can be used to purchase warm food at many fast food places in some California cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. Outside of California, very few states allow EBT to be used in this way and instead it must be used to purchase cold or packaged food.
In addition to the usual federal programs available for the poor, sick, or struggling in other states, such as EBT (food stamps) and Medicare, there’s many other programs as well that are somewhat exclusive to California. For example, when I was homeless in San Jose, California, I had a black spot show up on my chest that I thought might be melanoma or another form of skin cancer. I didn’t have health insurance or enough money to pay out of pocket to see a doctor and have it diagnosed, so I felt I was out of options.
Luckily, I lived in a state where all those years of working and paying taxes actually benefited me when I needed it because I found a program in the county I was living in (Santa Clara County) that allowed those with little money and few options to still see a doctor when they normally couldn’t afford to see one.
This had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) or any other federal programs and was mainly set up by the state and administered through the county.
Within two weeks after I signed up for the program I was able to see a regular primary healthcare doctor for about $10 USD who referred me to a dermatologist (a doctor who specializes in the skin). Now the only downside to using this program for low income poeple was that I had to wait about one month to see the dermatologist.
When I saw the dermatologist, she stated I had a precancerous mole and it would need to be removed, which she did herself there in the office rather quickly. This whole appointment and treatment cost me another $10. So all in all, I was able to see two doctors, one of whom was a specialist, for about $20 total.
So as much as people talk negatively about so-called “nanny states” and the social welfare programs available in them, this program might actually have saved my life. If it weren’t for programs like this in California, many people might actually die before they’re able to get progressing diseases or lesions looked at by a doctor. Getting it taken care of meant that I could eventually get back on my feet and stay alive, which meant I could generate even more tax money for the state which essentially pays back anything the doctors services may have cost the state.
More Shelters
California has the largest population in the U.S. and the largest economy as well. That means that there’s many more shelters there than in any other state. It’s for this reason that many homeless people migrate to California or choose to stay there when they do become homeless. This leads to a larger homeless population and sometimes this influx leads to shelters having no vacancies.
However, homeless people don’t have to travel as far to find other shelters as they would in other states with less shelters. If one shelter is full in Los Angeles or San Francisco, there’s plenty more in the local area to choose from. In some states, there may only be a few shelters available, even in some of the larger cities.
So if a few of them are full, a person may have no choice but to travel hours on a bus to the next city in hopes that they still have a vacancy there. However, sometimes it can also be difficult finding a place in California cities during winter time, since this is when more people living on the streets prefer to sleep inside.
When it gets cold outside, the local city and county governments in California often open other structures or places for the homeless to sleep at night. Normally, these would be the armories in different counties where the homeless people can go when the temperatures drop below a certain point.
More Flow of Money
A big reason for there being many more shelters and more social programs, aside from the state allowing more funding from tax revenues towards these, is because there’s a larger population and more money flowing throughout the state than in smaller states with less people and less cash flow.
This means more more resources and more opportunities for homeless people to get back on their feet. Someone who is homeless in a desolate area in another state might have a harder time getting back on their feet without the help. While non-profits often receive funding on the state and federal level, a lot of times they receive private donations and food from nearby businesses.
At the shelters I frequented in California, the food was always donated to them on a daily basis by the local grocery stores and food drives. The grocery stores had excess food that was at risk of expiring because the huge population nearby meant more customers and having to stock more fresh food each day. There were more private donations because there were many more wealthy people in the area and large corporations who employed thousands of well-paid employees.
In Silicon Valley, where I was both homeless and worked at large tech companies at different points in my life, nearby companies like Google, Cisco, and Yahoo all had thousands of employees in the area. Many of these types of companies would often run food drives where employees were asked to bring in canned food for Second Harvest and other local food charity organizations. The homeless and low-income families in the area greatly benefited from this food.
At one nearby shelter where I would eat meals at, the San Francisco 49ers football team donated bicycles and other goods to the organization. There was more than one occasion where I was sleeping outside shelters and wealthy families came in the middle of the night to donate blankets, cash, and other things to the homeless people sleeping on the pavement. I only had a sleeping bag when I first became homeless, that is, until a well-off family came and brought a brand new comforter from Walmart to me while I was sleeping outside one night.
This was one of the nicest things anybody had ever done for me, and they had enough money to pass out more than 20 of these to other people sleeping near me. These types of incidents happen all over the world and in every state, but it’s much more likely to happen in areas where there’s more money and more people.
Many Big Cities Interconnected
California is somewhat unique when compared to other states in the USA in the way that many of it’s largest cities are interconnected. There’s not even many places in other countries that are similar to this.
If you look at the Bay Area in California, there are three major cities with huge populations that are all within close proximity to each other. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose all have large homeless populations and much of this might have to do with the fact that all three of these urban locations are easily accessible from one another.
If you’re a homeless person and you need county or city resources and networking with other people to survive, you’re going to want to be in highly populated areas where much of these things can be found. By placing themselves in any of these three cities, they are giving themselves more than one option if things in their current city don’t work out for whatever reason.
Someone who is denied benefits or having problem finding work in San Jose might then go to Oakland or San Francisco instead. Oakland and San Francisco are less than a 5-minute bus ride from each other but belong to two completely different counties. San Jose is a bit further but still very easy to travel to from the others when using the local BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train system. The same could be said about Southern California, such as Los Angeles, where there’s many nearby counties and cities as well.
In most other states, the large cities have much more distance (hours of traveling) between each other in most cases. So California is set up in a way that makes it easy for people to travel between large populations and to seek assistance in multiple places.
More Transportation Options
In California, there’s public transportation routes almost everywhere. The state definitely has it’s own rural areas that are isolated and desolate, but the urban and suburbia areas have more transportation options than most other states in the USA can offer.
As was mentioned already, the Bay Area has the BART system, but that’s not the only system like it in the state. There’s buses, trains, light rails, and subways spread throughout the state that not only allow easy transport within each city, but also an easy way to get across the entire state.
For example, a homeless person who is stranded in Southern California can get all the way to Northern California quite quickly and cheaply. Say, for instance, that they’re stuck in Inglewood or somewhere in Los Angeles or Orange County and need to get to downtown LA’s Greyhound bus station. They can do so by taking the metro city buses, the local subway system, or even the light rail system in some areas of the city.
Often, riders will use a combination of these to get places based on routes. Once at the Greyhound station, a bus ticket all the way to San Francisco can cost as little as $15 depending on the day. There’s also other, more smaller companies that sometimes make the journey, though less frequently, and may be as cheap as $10.
Once at the Greyhound station in San Francisco, they can get to local shelters or anywhere around the city by riding the local Muni buses, BART, cable cars or streetcars (which are actually different from each other). While Greyhound buses may have similar pricing to travel throughout other states, the options of other connecting forms of public transportation are normally very limited.
Varied Terrain
Lastly, when people think of California, they often imagine the large cities that exist there and that’s the side of California that most homeless people see. However, much of the state’s geography is national parks, mountainous terrain, and wilderness, and this geography often lures many transients, survival types, camping enthusiasts, and vagrants to the state as well.
There’s more options in California than in most other states as far as terrain, because it’s one of the few places on earth where you can be in a city one moment and then be in a national park just minutes away. While the people who travel there may eventually end up in the more urban areas, many of these people initially go to California with hopes of camping out and living off the land there. They might start out in RV’s or campers, and eventually end up on cardboard mats or in tents after struggling a bit more.
Many camp out overnight in national parks by sleeping in their cars or by traditionally camping using tents at campsites. The national parks can be expensive to camp in, but there’s many forests and even BLM lands in California where they either legally or illegally camp.
BLM land (Bureau of Land Management) is land where people can legally camp for a number of days or weeks legally and for free. However, it’s normally in the most remote areas of the state and difficult to get to. But as I mentioned, forests are often an attractive place to camp for many homeless people.
When I was on the streets in San Jose, I wanted to get out of the city and a friend and I had looked at maps of the nearby area. We took a trip down to nearby Santa Cruz, but the parks were very expensive to camp there so I ended up trying to look for other options in the nearby woods. Eventually I ended up under a bridge with other homeless people, but soon decided it wasn’t for me and left Santa Cruz.
There are many people like me, who travel to places in search of a better situation so they can sleep more safely at night, stay rested, and get back on their feet more quickly.