Homeless Nation: West Coast Data and Trends in Homelessness (Part 2)

This week we dive into homelessness data on the west coast.

Welcome to part two of the homelessness series. If you haven’t read part one yet, I strongly recommend going back and taking a look as it provides a high level overview of homelessness in America. You can read it here.

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Last week we took a look at some data on homelessness throughout the country by focusing on the top 50 cities in the United States and whether they were unsheltered or not. Here are those maps again just as a refresher:

Total Homeless

Total Unsheltered Homeless

This week we are going to focus in on the west coast specifically because of how severe the issue is so let’s dive in!

DATA NOTE: Two things before we begin:

The first is that I normalized the data on a ratio of 1:1,000 rather than 100,000 this time. This is because we have many more cities as part of the analysis this time, some of which are relatively small in population (as in less than 100,000).

The second thing to note is that this is now a comparison only between the west coast cities. So these numbers are not relative to the rest of the country. I wanted to see which areas on the west coast had a relative higher amount of homeless and unsheltered homeless. If I had included the rest of the country, no west coast city would be in the smallest two brackets.

Alright we the data notes out of the way, let’s take a look at the data!

Total West Coast Homeless

The west coast is in pretty rough shape overall, but there’s actually quite a range of differences depending on where in the west you are specifically. In particular, California seems to be particularly bad for overall homeless. The Bay Area and southern California light up, but other notable areas are San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria on the coast as well as the northern California cities of Redding, Chico, and Yuba City. I don’t think we hear nearly as much about those cities in the media as we do San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The other big surprise to me is the Portland metro area (Portland, Hillsboro and Vancouver, WA). Living here and experiencing it daily, I’m surprised when compared to the rest of the west coast it’s actually on the low end. Granted this is pre-Covid, but I have a hard time imagining that Portland has gotten worse relative to the rest of the west coast. If anything, every city probably got worse in an equivalent manner. Eugene is also a bit of a surprise, though I don’t go down there much, I simply didn’t think it would be this much worse than the Portland metro region.

Now let’s take a look at unsheltered homeless.

Total West Coast Unsheltered Homeless

Again, California lights up when we look at unsheltered homeless. There’s actually not that much of a change. San Diego actually appears to shelter their homeless a bit better, but everywhere else seems normal. And, once again, I’m shocked Portland is so low on this map given the number of homeless camps I see daily. It’s either a fault with the data, or it’s a testament at just how bad California cities are.

I would also like to call out Las Vegas as being a city with a fair amount of homeless both in total numbers and in terms of unsheltered homeless, but, at least nationally, we don’t hear about it much. I’m not sure why that might be. I do wonder if the city/region makes a concentrated effort to ensure homeless aren’t super visible along the strip, which would make sense from a tourist/economic lens. I don’t know, obviously, I’m just theorizing. I’m sure there are smarter people than me distilling similar data and figuring out the trends and reasons.

State-level Data

Finally, I had a request to look at state level data for the entire country. I used the same data and just distilled the data by state so all the same data caveats exist.

Above we see the total homeless by state. Perhaps not surprising that, again, the west coast is pretty high. However, when I combined state-level data on total homeless, Washington D.C. actually has the most amount of homeless per 100,000 population. Granted Washington D.C. is a single city with a relative small amount of population so it makes a certain amount of sense.

Below we have the total unsheltered homeless and, again, the west coast is a bright spot as well as Washington D.C. Every other state, however, is basically reduced to the bottom two brackets which, again, I think just emphasizes the sheer magnitude of the issue that faces the west coast right now. No other state or region compares to the homelessness crisis hitting California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada (and Hawaii though I didn’t break down their data on the above maps because of a lack of data points).

Thanks for sticking with me on a subject that, while interesting, is very heartbreaking as well. As a society, we have completely accepted the reality that some people can’t even meet their basic needs and it’s honestly disturbing how much we’ve normalized it. I don’t know what the solutions are here, but understanding where it’s happening can at least help pinpoint where we should be directing resources. Unfortunately, as a nation, we don’t see this is a national problem and therefor places like the west coast are ill equipped to handle it by themselves.

If you are interested in learning more or helping, I strongly recommend taking a visit to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. These are the people spearheading the effort to get federal support.

Thanks for reading! See you on Thursday.