I am working with my wonderful UCLA colleagues, Vinit Mukhija and Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, and USC PhD student Alycia Cheng, on a project generously supported by a grant from AAPI Data at the University of California-Riverside to study Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) homelessness in California.
Why are we studying this? Are there Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander people in California who are not stably housed?
That is a really good question and difficult to assess using existing data. For this reason, most researchers and policy makers state that AANHPIs are “underrepresented” in homeless populations. This means that there are fewer AANHPIs than we might expect given their proportion of California's and the nation’s population.
Vinit Mukhija calls this issue “hidden homelessness.”
In chatting with one of my community research partners, Jury Candelario of APAIT/SSG in Los Angeles, AANHPIs tend to remain “hidden” or “invisible” when they are unstably or unhoused by sleeping in their cars, “couch surfing” (or sleeping temporarily in someone else’s housing), or other ways where they are not publicly seen or assumed to be homeless.
A recent paper by Chang et al. (2023) supports the idea that AANHPIs are "invisible" in discussions about homelessness. In this recent paper, the authors use mortality data (information about how people died) from Santa Clara County in California to assess how “unhoused” people died from 2011 to 2021, of which 87 were AANHPI, or 6% of the total number of unhoused people’s deaths. Interestingly, unhoused AANHPIs in Santa Clara County during this 10-year period tended to die from “injuries and illnesses” rather than from “drug/alcohol use” (compared to other racial/ethnic groups) (see graph below). This study indicates that AANHPIs are different from other unhoused or unstably housed populations that we may be more familiar with given the media and policy attention paid to homelessness in the state.
Source: Chang, J. S., Saxton, K., Bright, G., Ryan, M. S., Lai, E. F., Jorden, M. A., & Gutierrez, A. (2023). Invisibility as a structural determinant: mortality outcomes of Asians and Pacific islanders experiencing homelessness. Frontiers in Public Health, 10, 969288
For the new grant project, Vinit, Melany, Alycia, and I are working on (1) estimating the size and composition of the AANHPI unstably housed or unhoused population by using a variety of data sets and proxy variables — current research consistently suggests that AANHPIs are not unhoused though from speaking with service providers, this is not likely the case for the reasons above; (2) describing the pathways into (and potentially out of) “precarious” housing situations through interviews with service providers with experience with AANHPI unstably housed clients; and (3) outlining a scalable strategy to estimate the size and composition of AANHPI unstably housed populations in other locations (regions, states). We are hoping to have results by early 2024!
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