California's Homeless Crisis: An Annotated Bibliography

For more than a decade, California has topped the charts for the state with the largest homeless population. As of 2022, 30% of homeless people in the United States reside in California, including half of all unsheltered people. California has about 172,000 homeless individuals varying from families, young adults, veterans, elderly, sheltered/unsheltered, mentally ill, and more (HUB for Urban Initiatives). With a fast-growing population, there are many elements that need to be addressed in order to fully understand the severity of this crisis. 

The purpose of our annotated bibliography is to inform policymakers and educate the general public on the realities of the homeless community's past, present, and future regarding key factors that have affected California's 50-year-long crisis. We intend to shed light, on behalf of the vulnerable populations and subpopulations within the homeless community, on the major flaws that contributed to the beginning of this crisis to the new solutions being proposed today. We reference a variety of articles, including peer-reviewed articles and newspaper webpages, to be able to provide a diverse selection of authors' perspectives on homelessness in California. We divided the articles into 3 sections that focus on separate elements to provide the reader with a full understanding of the history behind the homelessness crisis, the causes behind why people are being forced to live on the streets, and proposed solutions to help the community get the resources needed to get off the streets. 

We suggest doing further research on why previous policies have failed to help decrease the homeless population and how we can alter the current policies to actually help the homeless community.