Redlining, Red Embers, Golden State
Across the Bay from San Francisco’s Financial District, high-rise home to all six of the city’s Fortune 500 companies, sits the High Street homeless camp in Oakland, California. The 100 or so residents here make homes of shelters thrown together from abandoned cars and materials scavenged from dumpsters. They live among rats and with no running water. One U.N. representative has compared the camp to the slums of Delhi, the kind of Global South poverty many Americans scorn as foreign and unimaginable in their country.
This intensely visible display of inequality and destitute living conditions is commonplace across California, the sunny and optimistic home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. According to The Atlantic, 130,00 Californians are homeless—accounting for roughly one in four homeless people in the United States. Astronomical housing prices, the legacy of racist zoning laws, and increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters have exacerbated one another to make the Golden State of opportunity largely unlivable, even for renters and homeowners.
In a state on the forefront of environmental collapse, the Hollywood, tech, and business elite can easily pack up their lives and leave upon the final tipping point—the residents of Skid Row have nowhere else to turn.
While California is often seen as a “preferable” place to be homeless in the U.S., with its mild climate and forgiving winters, homelessness poses extreme health hazards everywhere. Many of these issues go without saying: without a stable place to live, consistent access to food and medication disappears, and many of America’s homeless suffer from untreated mental illness and violent crime.
The wildfires that have plagued both California’s rural and urban areas have made homelessness even more dangerous. With nowhere to go, many Californians are unable to obey emergency warnings to stay inside amidst harmful particulate matter in the air. These conditions can make breathing extremely difficult after prolonged exposure, especially since lung diseases like asthma already affect the homeless at twice the rate of the general population. Impossibly long waitlists plague permanent supportive housing, while temporary shelters fill up quickly. These overnight homes are also unforgiving to extenuating circumstances like drug addiction and are prone to the spread of contagious illnesses. As a result, many of California’s homeless have no choice but to face the volatile conditions of wildfires, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are both vulnerable to fires and have the highest concentration of homeless residents in the state.
California’s natural disasters have also been a major perpetrator of homelessness and the housing crisis in and of themselves. One woman in Oakland’s High Street camp lost her home in a 2014 wildfire, and later her livelihood when her place of work was lost to another fire. Real-estate agents report that they anticipate even higher rents in the aftermath of the fire because of the sudden influx of people on the housing market. An earthquake of unprecedented magnitude, “the Big One” which the West Coast anxiously anticipates, could leave hundreds of thousands more without a home. If California infrastructure struggles to support the issue as it stands, a catastrophe of that scale could render all progress in public housing and other resources completely insufficient. FEMA earthquake specialist Forrest Lanning puts it bluntly: “There’s no way to accommodate those number of people in the Bay Area.”
Deeply rooted historical trends can help explain how California got here, and the demographics of its homeless population. One of the most striking physical reminders of the state’s housing crisis can be seen on L.A.’s “Skid Row,” a stable community of homeless Angelenos spanning blocks in the shadow of Downtown Los Angeles’ looming skyline. In Los Angeles, the homeless population is disproportionately black to a shocking degree. African Americans make up just eight percent of L.A. County but account for a staggering 42 percent of its homeless residents. A long history of racist zoning laws usually associated with the Rust Belt of the Midwest can help explain the epidemic of black homelessness across California, especially in Los Angeles County. In a process known as redlining, housing authorities restricted black families escaping the segregation of the South to certain parts of South L.A., while real estate agents marked these areas as “undesirable for investment,” preventing the residents of these majority-black neighborhoods from obtaining home loans. Declining employment opportunities alongside skyrocketing rent prices have drained an area once hailed as the epicenter of black culture in L.A., driving many of its residents into homelessness and areas like Skid Row. Today, racism and bias against felony records (again disproportionately held by black Angelenos) continue to obstruct securing a mortgage or apartment lease—an informal manifestation of redlining. With fires and earthquakes becoming an increasingly relevant threat for California’s homeless, the problem’s racial roots highlight the disproportionate effects of climate change on not only the poor but racial and ethnic minorities. In a state at the forefront of environmental collapse, the Hollywood, tech, and business elite can easily pack up their lives and leave upon the final tipping point—be it an extremely destructive earthquake or a fire that devastates city centers. The residents of Skid Row, however, have nowhere else to turn.
Much of California’s homeless have no choice but to face the volatile conditions of wildfires, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
What’s more, the homelessness crisis shows no sign of improvement. Despite the billions of dollars that California lawmakers have poured into various solutions, Los Angeles has seen a 36 percent increase in homeless individuals since 2010, and San Francisco has seen a 16 percent increase from 2011. The construction of new shelters with thousands of new beds can still only accommodate so many, and fails to get at the systematic injustices that have plagued African-American communities in California’s urban centers. Furthermore, the dense urbanization that would help solve the problem faces vicious opposition from “not in my backyard” homeowners—California liberals who support affordable housing on paper, but not when it involves development in their neighborhoods. This hypocritical attitude applies doubly to the development of homeless shelters.
On a recent visit to Los Angeles, I walked through Venice, a hyper-gentrified neighborhood with mega-mansions, man-made canals, and its fair share of A-list residents. While Venice seems to tout the culture and aesthetics of Los Angeles’ politically progressive reputation, I saw yard sign after yard sign reading “Fight Back Venice” along the canals. I later learned that this rallying cry belonged to a movement opposing what they called “The Monster on the Median,” a proposed public and transitionary housing complex on a large public parking lot. This movement follows a similar outrage at the prospect of a shelter between Venice and Santa Monica. These residents despise the visibility of the homeless epidemic in their affluent neighborhood (I also saw many intentional obstructions on public sidewalks), yet also categorically reject attempts to house and protect this population, which would also defer them from their sightlines. Despite the logic and accordance with fair housing laws behind projects in areas like Venice, they demand that the city focus on shelters and public housing in less desirable neighborhoods—where they won’t need to think about it.
Herein exists a vicious cycle—absurd rent prices drive even the middle class to these environmentally volatile areas, development causes destructive fires, creating new waves of homelessness and spiking rents.
Even those who can afford to rent have been driven into far-away suburbs and towns and face grueling, sprawling commutes to get to and from work. 54 percent of residents in Los Angeles County are “rent burdened,” paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent—with more than half of this population paying more than 50 percent of their income. In San Francisco, HUD defines a family of four earning $117,400 as “low income.” Facing opposition from homeowners in urban centers, development in these peripheral towns allows more families to work in California’s cities, but puts them at serious risk for harm in a wildfire. Many of these communities exist in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), artificial municipalities among forests and hills already vulnerable to fires, but even more so through the manmade construction that offers additional kindling. Herein exists a vicious cycle—absurd rent prices drive even the middle class to these environmentally volatile areas, and the development needed to accommodate them causes destructive fires, creating new waves of homelessness and spiking rents.
There exists a ferocious synergy between racist public policy, housing prices, homelessness, and climate crises in California. All of them drive one another, drawing the very livability of the 31st State into question. California lies at the forefront of several issues facing America at large: income inequality, the tangible impacts of climate change, and the continued legacy of postwar segregation. At the same time, California embodies ideals of manifest destiny and Americana at large. Hollywood is the bastion of all American pop culture, and Silicon Valley led America into the tech boom of the 1990s. While the collision of housing and climate emergencies in California may seem an insurmountable disaster, America must not look away. For these phenomena may well be a harbinger of things to come nationwide, and a screaming sign of the need for immediate structural change. In September, California approved a bill that would establish statewide rent control, which establishes important protections against evictions and is certainly a step in the right direction. However, even with these rent caps, housing prices remain egregious and widely out of reach, with or without rent increases over five percent. Furthermore, landlords may respond by opting out of the rental business entirely, and pivoting to owner-occupied homes. While symbolically significant, the move fails to get at the real concrete solution of affordable housing construction. To get at the root of California’s crisis, lawmakers and residents alike must embrace the dense development of affordable and public housing in the city’s urban centers—and yes, among the wealthy. It’s time to stop treating the homeless like a blight on America’s urban landscapes, and to instead offer direct support within our communities and promote climate-conscious urbanization in the process.