On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 10:27:40 AM UTC-7, Dave P. wrote:
> A Rising Tally of Lonely Deaths on the Streets
> By Thomas Fuller, April 18, 2022, NY Times
>
> Austin, Denver, Indianapolis, Nashville & Salt Lake City
> are among the cities where officials and homeless advocates
> have said they have been alarmed by the rising number of deaths.
> But the crisis is most acute in California, where about
> one in four of the nation’s 500,000 homeless people lives.
>
> The process of tallying homeless deaths is painstaking,
> involving the cross-referencing of homeless databases and
> death reports. But based on data from the handful of California’s
> 58 counties that report homeless deaths, experts said that 4,800
> is a conservative estimate for last year.
>
> In Los Angeles County, the homeless population grew by 50% from
> 2015 to 2020. Homeless deaths have grown at a far faster rate,
> an increase of about 200 percent during the same period to
> nearly 2,000 deaths in the county last year.
>
> “These are profoundly lonely deaths,” said David Modersbach,
> who led the first public study of homeless deaths in Alameda
> County across the Bay from San Francisco.
>
> In some cases, bodies are left undiscovered for hours. Others
> are unclaimed at the morgue despite efforts to reach family
> members. In San Francisco, where people sleeping in cardboard
> boxes, tents and other makeshift shelters are a common sight,
> the body of a homeless man who died on a traffic median last
> spring lay for more than 12 hours before being retrieved. “Guy
> lay dead here & no one noticed,” said a cardboard sign left at
> the scene.
>
> Those who sleep on the streets speak of the wear that it imposes
> on the body, of several untreated illnesses and the loneliness
> of being surrounded by pedestrians who ignore you.
>
> Billy, a metal worker and carpenter from New Jersey who now
> sleeps in the narrow alleys behind Venice Beach in Los Angeles,
> constantly feels the reminders of his previous jobs. At 50 he
> has chronic pain from an accident while trimming trees, treating
> it with a jumbo-size bottle of Aleve he keeps in his backpack.
>
> He has overdosed twice from heroin, revived both times with
> the drug naloxone, and has watched as friends have disappeared
> around him.
>
> “I can name 30 or 40 people who have died of overdoses and most
> of them were in my demographic,” said Billy, who did not want
> his last name published because he said it would embarrass his
> three grown children.
>
> A study by the L.A. County Dept of Public Health found that
> homeless people are 35 times as likely as the general population
> to die of a drug or alcohol overdose. They are also four times
> as likely to die of heart disease, 16 times as likely to die in
> a car crash, 14 times as likely to be murdered and eight times
> as likely to die of suicide.
>
> California, flush with cash from pandemic budget surpluses, has
> poured record amounts of money into combating homelessness. Gov.
> Gavin Newsom announced a $12 billion homelessness package last
> year that included funds to construct 42,000 new housing units.
>
> L.A. County voted overwhelmingly in 2017 to raise its sales tax
> and generate a projected $3.5 billion over 10 years for homeless-
> ness programs. Since then the county has housed 78,000 people.
>
> Yet, county officials say they can't keep up: While 207 homeless
> people find housing every day, 227 people become homeless daily,
> the county calculates.
>
> And once on the street, mental health, drug abuse and general
> medical well-being can spiral out of control. Mr. Modersbach
> said he had been struck by how many homeless people were dying
> of diseases outside of hospitals or other clinical settings.
>
> “To die of heart disease, liver disease, respiratory diseases —
> on your own — is pretty shocking,” he said.
>
> Of the 809 homeless deaths from 2018 to 2020 in Alameda County,
> according to the study, one-quarter were from drug overdoses,
> half were from heart attacks, cancer, strokes and chronic
> illnesses, and the rest were from accidents, suicides and
> homicides. In Sacramento County at least three homeless people
> froze to death last year.
>
> A key distinction among the homeless population today is the
> graying of the destitute.
>
> Margot Kushel, a doctor specializing in homeless care, has
> tracked the rise of the average age of homeless people in the
> San Francisco Bay Area from their mid-30s three decades ago to
> their mid-50s today.
>
> But even that rise in age does not tell the full story of their
> vulnerability, she said. Homeless people in their 50s are showing
> geriatric symptoms: difficulty dressing and bathing, visual and
> hearing problems, urinary incontinence.
>
> “Poverty is very wearing on the body,” Dr. Kushel said.
> “Fifty is the new 75.”
>
> A quarter of the homeless people she began studying 9 years ago
> are now dead. The median age of death was 63, well below the
> average U.S. life expectancy of 77.
>
> Across California, homeless deaths are overwhelmingly among men,
> and especially Black men who are dying on the streets at rates
> far disproportionate to their share of the general population.
> In Los Angeles County, men make up 67 percent of the homeless
> population but 83 percent of homeless deaths. In San Francisco,
> men in their 50s have the highest rates of overdose deaths among
> all age deciles.
>
> Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychologist, said the issue of
> death and despair among older men was underappreciated and
> understudied. He said society should ask the question: “Can we
> help men from dying so much?”
>
> David Brown, 59, a former bus driver and fast-food employee in
> San Francisco who is currently enrolled in a rehab program at
> the Salvation Army, describes the circumstances that put him on
> the streets as a life’s accumulation of woes. The knee problems
> from cramming his tall frame into the bus driver’s seat. The
> type 2 diabetes. The prison terms he served for burglary. A
> lifetime struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse.
>
> So many friends died in shootings around the time of the crack
> epidemic in the 1980s and from overdoses on the streets that he
> feels entirely bereft. “I don’t have anybody in my life,” he said.
>
> Pamela Prickett, a sociologist who has studied death records in
> Los Angeles, said one measure of male isolation is that men’s
> bodies go unclaimed at the morgue at twice the rate of women.
> The rates that bodies go unclaimed, which have been climbing
> since the 1970s, are highest among men in their 40s and 50s.
>
> “There are more people not getting married or getting divorced
> and not getting remarried,” Ms. Prickett said. “So we find lots
> of loners.”
>
> Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, said he had seen a
> pattern of men being ill-equipped to handle “triggers” in life
> such as illness and losing a job or a spouse.
>
> “As men get older they tend to be less good at building and
> maintaining relationships,” he said. “When people do not have
> a safety net to catch them in the form of community and strong
> healthy relationships, it’s much more likely they end up struggling
> with substance use disorders, with mental illness and homelessness.”
>
> Ivan Perez, 53, is philosophical about what caused his life to
> go off the rails. His wife’s miscarriage and their marriage that
> fell apart. A marijuana habit that sank his career as a stockbroker.
> Prison time for an assault when he was high. Gambling.
>
> “Being alone you kind of have no excuses to say it’s my wife’s
> fault, it’s my mom’s fault, it’s society’s fault,” Perez said.
>
> In recent months he has slept on the streets in a tent near the
> North Hollywood subway station. The soundtrack to his life, he
> said, is the hissing of passing trucks next to his tent and the
> swoosh of street cleaners.
>
> “There’s a certain posture that you take when you are homeless,”
> he said. “You lose your dignity.”
>
> His goal, he said, was to live as long as his father, who died
> at 54 and a half. He is not far off.
>
> Perez remembered the hopes he had when he was younger of
> becoming an actor or a playwright. “I tried to do all the
> right things and it blew up in my face,” he said.
> “What a raw deal this life turned out to be.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/us/homeless-deaths-los-angeles.html