The first statewide snapshot of California’s homelessness crisis since the pandemic hit reveals that the number of people without a stable place to call home increased by at least 22,500 over the past three years, to 173,800, according to an analysis by CalMatters.
Of these numbers, a substantial increase in the Latino community stands out.
While Black people continue to be overrepresented on the street, more and more Latinos are falling into homelessness.
The city and county of Los Angeles, for example, saw its total homeless population rise by 4% from 2020 to 69,000 people, an increase of 2,700 people. But its homeless Latino population spiked by 26%, or nearly 6,000 folks. Los Angeles is home to 40% of the state’s homeless population and is seen by experts as a bellwether for homelessness in the state.
Latinos were long on the economic brink before being disproportionately sickened, killed and economically devastated by the pandemic, said Melissa Chinchilla, health services specialist and associate investigator at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute.
“I think for a long time, the Latino advocates in homeless services felt that the numbers were actually not reflective of how bad the situation was or how high the need was,” Chinchilla said.
When state and local governments implemented pandemic programs to help people stay afloat, many Latinos were shut out, she said. Some people paid under the table, like house cleaners or field workers, may have struggled to qualify for unemployment insurance, while others with informal leases or language barriers ran up against similar problems with rental assistance.
And while California had laws to guard against eviction during the pandemic, undocumented immigrants were less likely to use them because of their precarious legal status. Plus, thousands of people got evicted during the pandemic anyway.
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