Researchers from UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative and the San Francisco Department of Public Health found that housing homeless residents with mild to moderate COVID-19 in hotel rooms lowered the burden on hospitals overwhelmed with more seriously ill patients. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, underscore the public health benefits of providing stable housing and services to those who need them most.

As part of the National Low Income Housing Coalition's (NLIHC) Housing First Promotes Health call in February 2023, Margot Kushel, MD, director of UCSF’s Benioff Housing and Homelessness Initiative, shared research on how housing improves health outcomes.

In this podcast, Margot Kushel, MD, explains the country’s rise in homelessness and the critical impact of housing on the health needs of vulnerable populations.

Housing is linked to lower cancer mortality in US veterans, a recent study found. Hannah C. Decker, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco and lead author of the study, spoke about the study, the pervasiveness of veteran homelessness, and how homelessness affects health. Dr. Decker said, "We are really interested is getting a deeper understanding of how the VA gets veterans into housing, especially those that are diagnosed with serious chronic diseases, like cancer."

Housing is a primary social determinant of health and a new study published in Health Affairs shows that lung and colorectal cancer mortality was higher among veterans who were unhoused compared to those who were housed. Hannah C. Decker, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco and lead author, and her colleagues suggest that "adopting the VA’s strategies in other settings where people without housing seek care, particularly for patients diagnosed with cancer, may help improve outcomes in this vulnerable population."

A panel at the CalMatters Ideas Festival debates how to reduce homelessness without punishing poverty. Panelists discussed the underlying causes and what California should be focusing on. Margot Kushel, MD, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said, "We know how to treat people, you have to start, though, with the housing." 

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.

Programs in San Francisco that offer people living on the streets respite, shelter, and treatment often fall dismally short of the need. “There just isn’t enough of it,” Margot Kushel ...

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, who studies the intersection of homelessness and health.

Ned Resnikoff, policy manager at BHHI, said the best long-term solution to homelessness is to build more low-income housing. In the interim, people who are currently homeless need to be...

Homelessness has surged in the United States. It is a devastating public health crisis with ruinous, often permanent, effects on people’s lives. Margot Kushel, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco, said, "We will not solve this problem by denying the enormous trauma that people who’ve experienced homelessness have been through.”

Hospital emergency departments (ED) are on the frontlines of serving people experiencing homelessness, and this report investigated what ED data can reveal about homelessness in California. Hospitals operated by counties and the University of California reported higher shares of ED visits by people experiencing homelessness. Linking discharge data with homeless services programs can offer insights into how people engage with programs and help provide better resources to evaluate the programs and investments aimed at improving the lives of Californians experiencing homelessness.

A comprehensive new study finds the vast majority of the California's unhoused residents lived in the state before losing their housing. The goal of the report was to take a systematic approach to understanding the causes of homelessness and potential solutions instead of relying on the emotional responses the crisis can trigger, said study author Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. “What we were trying to do is take the rhetoric down a bit, and using really scientific best practices, to get a handle on not only who was experiencing homelessness but what was happening in their lives before they became homeless,” Dr. Kushel said.

This news article reports on varying methods quantifying homelessness in San Francisco. These metrics — the PIT count, city data, and others — are often mere snapshots of the whole picture, or require people to reach out for services, said Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. That means a lot of people are left unseen. People drift in and out of homelessness; a person who was homeless at some point in the year may not be any more, she said.

Hemal Kanzaria, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and faculty advisor at UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, discussed findings of a new UCSF study describing how the hotel isolation and quarantine strategy used for homeless residents of San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic benefitted the entire community.

Maria Raven, MD, Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and a faculty advisor at BHHI, was quoted in this piece describing how hotels leased during the pandemic to prevent the spread of coronavirus provided shelter for unhoused people at risk of severe COVID-19. Dr. Raven said, "When someone is sick and vulnerable, let's get them housed and keep them housed."

The UC Center Sacramento hosted a "Special Winter Symposium: Dimensions of Chronic Homelessness and the Search for Solutions." In session 4, Margot Kushel, MD, director of UCSF’s Benioff Housing and Homelessness Initiative, joined State Senator John Laird and Dr. Toby Ewing to discuss how California is addressing the issue of people who are chronically unsheltered and what barriers remain.

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.

Margot Kushel, MD, was interviewed about the COVID-19 testing event in San Francisco. UCSF partnered with the San Francisco Department of Public Health and several community-based organ...

The perception of people experiencing homelessness is often based on anecdote. In the first episode of WPLNs 9 part housing series, In My Place, Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, joins host Khalil Ekulona to talk about the causes of homelessness, the misconceptions and myths of homelessness, and what cities can solve the problem. As the conversation moved to the misconceptions of people experiencing homelessness, Dr. Kushel said, "I think the single biggest misconception is that homelessness is synonymous with mental health and substance use problems." Dr. Kushel adds "At its heart, homelessness is a problem of housing cost."

A landmark study by UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI) paints a different picture on people experiencing homelessness in California. Researchers at BHHI sought to capture the experiences of all people aged 18 years and older who experience some form of homelessness in California. "It took a lot of time and was a lot of work, but we wanted to be able to show policymakers what this issue looks like instead of just giving them more numbers to look at," said Margot Kushel, MD, the study’s principal investigator and director of UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

LifeMoves Mountain View is an interim shelter program that provides supportive services to help people who experience homelessness find stable housing in 3 to 4 months. However, data has shown that many of those experiencing homelessness are unable to find stable housing within that timeframe. Margot Kushel, MD, director of UCSF’s Benioff Housing and Homelessness Initiative, said, "People are not homeless because they need services. People are homeless because there isn't any housing."

Hosted by the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence (the Partnership), lead researcher Anita Hargrave, MD, BHHI Policy Director Tiana Moore, PhD, and CPEDV staff dove deeper into policy recommendations and solutions that arose from the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH) findings on the intersection of intimate partner violence and homelessness. The webinar featured an in-depth discussion of local and state opportunities, as well as funding and programmatic policy recommendations for advocates, policymakers, and other decision-makers.

A special report on the relationship between intimate partner violence and homelessness in California by the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, found that 1 in 5 women who become homeless in California flee their homes to escape violence. Participants described the need to plan their exit in advance and to accumulate resource; however, of those who experienced intimate partner violence in the 6 months prior to homelessness, only 12% sought help from a domestic violence organization. Margot Kushel, MD, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said, "Some people honestly had no idea what is a domestic violence shelter. Other people told us when they had to run, they had to run. They didn’t have time to figure out where to find a shelter."