In the case of the January 2025 fires, some 200,000 people lost their homes. “The wildfires were among the most devastating … urban wildfires in history, and as traumatic as they have been for those who lost their homes, those living on the street suffered as well,” Randall Kuhn, professor in the UCLA Fielding Department of Community Health Sciences and a co-author of three of the studies, said in a university news release accompanying the most recent one, which was published Thursday.
Of the people experiencing homelessness in the affected communities who were surveyed in the study, more than three-quarters reported injuries or other major disruptions to their lives because of the fires.
Those are the latest findings in a broader set of four recently published papers that contend that homelessness should be understood as more than just a chronic housing problem. Indeed, Kuhn said the studies’ findings show how climate disasters and anti-homeless policies can compound each other. People who recently had been displaced were more likely to report wildfire effects, he said, and the fires then made them more vulnerable by damaging tents and destroying possessions.
“Homelessness is both a disaster in itself, and a situation in which most every month welcomes the arrival of a new disaster,” Kuhn said.
Smoke exposure during the fires also took a toll: 40% reported worsening respiratory symptoms, including coughing, shortness of breath and wheezing. Kuhn said 31% of unsheltered respondents reported injuries, which were more common among people who were already dealing with other health problems.
More than half of the respondents said it was harder to find shelter after the fires than it had been before.
One of the studies, published in JAMA Network Open on April 6, examined homelessness trends across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found that each home lost to climate-related events per 10,000 people was associated with a 1 percentage point greater increase in homelessness.
“Our findings underscore the reality that homelessness can be seen as a predictable consequence of climate disasters,” Kathryn Leifheit, a UCLA assistant professor and lead author of the national study, said in the news release.
According to Leifheit, from 2020 to 2022, homelessness rates in the U.S rose by 11% — but if you took climate disasters out of the equation, that number would have dropped to 8%. The researchers controlled for rents and other economic factors, though Leifheit said the findings still should be interpreted cautiously.
The same national study found that COVID-19 pandemic-era eviction protections appeared to blunt what could have been even steeper increases in homelessness.
“If states and local governments had allowed evictions to proceed during that period, we estimate that the average increase would have been nearly 20%,” Craig Pollack, a Johns Hopkins physician and co-author of the study, said in the announcement.
Kuhn said the wildfire findings also exposed how disaster response systems can fail people who already are living without shelter.
He said disasters can cut unhoused people off from everyday support, as outreach workers are diverted and places such as libraries, soup kitchens and cafes close. Street medicine teams and mobile clinics, which provide direct medical care where unhoused people live, can help bridge that gap, he said, and mutual-aid networks and informal communication systems within encampments can help spread information to people who may have phones but are not connected to official alert systems.
Another study in the series, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine in March, found that encampment sweeps and frequent displacement were associated with poorer physical and psychological health among unhoused people in Los Angeles.
The study found that roughly one-third of unsheltered respondents had experienced a sweep in the month before they were surveyed, and nearly half had been displaced. Benjamin Henwood, a USC social work researcher and co-author of the paper, said that kind of instability can cause people to lose medications, documents, belongings and connections to outreach workers and care providers.
“Over the longer term, it creates a kind of chronic instability that makes it extremely difficult to engage in healthcare, maintain treatment, or make progress toward housing,” Henwood said. “In effect, it keeps people in a constant state of starting over.”
Kuhn said the findings highlight the need for closer coordination between emergency response systems and homeless services so people are better protected during future disasters. He added that the studies also point to immediate policy responses and broader efforts to reduce the risk of homelessness before and after disasters.
“Together, these actions will reduce the risk of homelessness, before and after disasters,” Kuhn said.
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