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KQED’s Sold Out housing podcast examined the interplay of Margot Kushel’s work within and beyond medicine as traditionally understood. “There is no medicine as powerful as housing,” Dr. Kushel said.

The UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix hosted Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, for an in-depth discussion of homelessness in the Bay Area, emphasizing the causal factors of a chronic shortage of low-income housing and structural racism. “Homelessness is not caused by mental health and substance use problems,” Kushel explained. “The more we blame this problem on highly stigmatized medical conditions, the more it lets us off the hook for solving the fundamental problems that have brought us to this point.”

An innovative strategy to house Santa Clara County’s struggling homeless residents is working, according to a new study co-authored by Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. The results could impact how agencies in the Bay Area and beyond address homelessness.

The vast majority of even the most impaired homeless people can be successfully housed if they are given access to permanent housing with voluntary supportive services, a rigorous new study from UCSF has found. “The bottom line is that even really high-risk folks can be housed,” said Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

For unhoused people living in areas impacted by wildfire smoke, “The choice is being in a congregate shelter or being outside, and [with] COVID it's pretty clear that it's safer to be outside than to be in a congregate shelter," said Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. "For people who are outside, it's just worsened their already precarious health situation."

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, discussed how low-wage workers and their families are at particularly high risk during the pandemic. “The type of work that (homeless) people do is the type of work that we have seen to be at highest risk because it has been the type of work that you can’t do from home.”

Homeless people are among the most vulnerable populations in the COVID-19 pandemic, yet they’re largely invisible during this crisis. Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, called the pandemic “a crisis within a crisis,” noting that most homeless people are usually in poorer health and, with widespread closures, had lost access to services providing food, water, and shelter.

Researchers and advocates say much is unknown about how the pandemic has affected the estimated half-million people without housing in the Untied States. Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, discussed how obtaining good data on the homeless population is difficult because hospitals and death certificates don’t track housing status. While she was hesitant to draw conclusions about how the pandemic has affected homeless people overall, she said, “This may be an example where being outside and unsheltered, just in terms of COVID, maybe let people be at lower risk. But again, we just don’t really know.”

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, realized early in her career that the most important thing for her patients’ health was housing. Now a preeminent expert on homelessness and director of BHHI, she delves into what the COVID-19 crisis reveals about housing and health.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was quoted in an article about how unhoused people in San Francisco and nationwide are contracting the coronavirus at about the same rate as housed people. Isolating people in hotels and thinning out shelters helped—and for those left outside, the fresh open air was a greater protector than experts anticipated. "There’s no question that the hotel rooms and downsizing the shelters helped a lot," said Dr. Kushel.