By Reggie Ellis, The Sun-Gazette, February 5, 2020
Visalia has the highest percentage of homeless people with highest need in the entire country.
The Sun-Gazette reported last week that Tulare and Kings County, where most of the homeless population lives in Visalia, had the highest percentage nationwide of unsheltered, chronically homeless people, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.
Nearly one-third of the homeless in the Tulare-Kings Continuum of Care (CofC), statistical areas where homeless people are served, are considered chronically homeless, meaning they have been without shelter for a year or at least four separate times in the past three years. To make matters worse, 95.8% of those who are chronically homeless in the area have no place to go for shelter. That’s the highest percentage in the nation, more than Los Angeles, Fresno, Oakland and Long Beach and 10% higher than similarly sized areas, urban areas not among the nation’s 50 largest cities, in Eugene, Ore., Vallejo, Calif., Oxnard, Calif. and Savannah, Ga.
Comments (0)