News

UCSF study demonstrates need for alternatives to congregate shelter arrangements. Even if shelters take extensive precautions to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks, cities may need to reduce their reliance on congregate shelters.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was interviewed on KQED's Forum along with other guests providing an update on programs to help the homeless during the pandemic and what’s being done to ensure permanent solutions to the housing crisis.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was interviewed about BHHI’s work with Community Health Outreach Workers and community organizations to deliver COVID-19 testing to unhoused people. “A lot of the lessons we learned will resonate very clearly, not just for COVID, but for any public health outreach, whether it’s vaccination campaigns, bringing health care services to people, or doing work on sexually transmitted infections and overdose prevention,” Dr. Kushel said.

The coronavirus pandemic is upending the Bay Area’s fight against homelessness. Many of the changes—good and bad—will outlast the pandemic, says Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, who studies the intersection of homelessness and health.

Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, was quoted about upcoming changes to hotel programs for unhoused people. With California’s Project Roomkey winding down, hotels for Bay Area residents experiencing homelessness are slated to close. Despite uncertain prospects for keeping people housed in the future, “Project Roomkey has played a huge role in decreasing the disasters in the Bay Area,” said Dr. Kushel, including slowing the spread of COVID-19.

Maria Raven, MD, Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and a faculty advisor at BHHI, was quoted in this piece about a UCSF study about Project Welcome Home showing that permanent supportive housing can help keep chronically homeless people with severe health and substance-abuse issues housed. Margot Kushel, MD, coauthored the study.

An increase in San Francisco homelessness funding could sharpen focus on permanent supportive housing. The UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative's Cynthia Nagendra emphasized the importance of permanent supportive housing as the centerpiece of any plan for using new funds to address homelessness.

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.