On any given night in the United States, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, over half a million people are without a home. That number may have decreased nationwide in the past few years, but California remains on the forefront of the problem, accounting for 20 percent of the country’s homeless in 2014.
With the winter’s freezing temperatures and El Niño’s massive rainstorms, what to do about the thousands living in our city streets has been making headlines on both the East and West coasts.
What policymakers and the general public need to recognize is that the homeless are aging faster than the general population in the United States. This shift in the demographics has major implications for how municipalities and health care providers deal with homeless populations.
