By Aaron Schrank, Photo: Sam Comen, Mother Jones, September 22, 2023
Nearly one-third of all Americans experiencing homelessness live in California. Each night, more than 170,000 people sleep outside or in temporary shelters across the state. The vast majority—90 percent—were living in California when they became unhoused. And 75 percent are homeless in the same county in which they lost their housing.
In cities across the state, housing has been a dominant political issue. Local leaders have bemoaned the long-term lack of supply of affordable shelter and the acute rise in the unhoused population. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has battled to allow for sweeps of tent cities. A prosecutor of the county that includes Sacramento recently claimed that the capital city’s inability to remove homeless people amounted to an “utter collapse into chaos.” Culver City banned tent encampments.
Amid a homelessness crisis, the unhoused have been less heard in these discussions. Starting in the fall of 2021, Aaron Shrank and Sam Comen conducted interviews and photographed unhoused people living in Los Angeles and Northern California as a companion piece to the University of California San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative’s California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness to shed light on those affected. You can hear their stories and read a lightly condensed version of the transcripts below. More of Comen and Shrank’s work is available at the website Unhoused CA.
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