Resource Center

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.

This UCSF study examined whether permanent supportive housing reduces the use of acute health care and other services among people experiencing chronic homelessness. The Permanent Supportive Housing program intervention was able to house 86% of chronically homeless adults randomized to the treatment group based on their high use of multiple systems. Even the most frequent clients of medical, psychiatric, and emergency services were housed successfully, as demonstrated in this study of Project Welcome Home in Santa Clara County.

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.

Older homeless-experienced adults have low rates of advance care planning (ACP) engagement. In this cross-sectional qualitative study, researchers examined potential barriers and solutions to ACP engagement. Researchers found that participants believed that ACP is important, but acknowledge the multiple barriers to engagement. Potential solutions include capitalizing on opportunities outside health care setting and focusing on the period after housing and tailoring content.

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, and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, MD, discuss how the pandemic has highlighted "a tale of two Californias."

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.

As shelters in San Francisco face increased rates of infection, Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, discussed what’s needed in response, and why the approach can’t be exactly the same as for the housed population: “There is no way to shelter in place when you don't have housing.”

In an effort to understand the spread of the coronavirus among the large population of homeless people in San Francisco’s District 10, UCSF joined with the United Council of Human Services and other community organizations to put together the weekend event.