California housing costs are spiraling so high that they are pushing the state’s homelessness crisis into places it’s never been before — sparsely populated rural counties.
Statewide, The Chronicle’s examination shows, homelessness rose by 15 percent from 2015 to this year. In heavily populated centers such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where tent cities have long been part of the landscape, even double-digit increases like that might not suggest that something has fundamentally changed. But in rural areas, the increases have come as a shock.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which conducts the biennial counts of homeless individuals, is scheduled to release its latest national homeless tally this fall. The Chronicle built its database for California by obtaining the counts for all 55 counties that performed tabulations. The calculations show that the increase in homeless people since 2015 has brought the total homeless population in California to a new high of 135,139 — the most of any state.
Just like in the big cities, substance abuse and mental illness are rife among the hard-core homeless denizens of the rural parts of the state, meaning solutions require more than just scoring a bed.
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