Silicon Valley faced a seemingly impossible task: create permanent housing solutions for its most vulnerable residents in one of the least affordable markets in the world.
Yet, despite this daunting challenge, over the past five years, the tide finally seems to be turning.
California’s capital is one of the toughest places in the state for low-income seniors to afford rent, according to a new study.
UCLA researchers found that 68 percent of low-income seniors in Sacramento County suffer a severe rent burden, which means half or more of their pre-tax income is going toward housing. Another 17 percent suffer a moderate burden, where 30 percent or more of their pre-tax income is going to rent.
On any given night, 3,665 people experience homelessness in Sacramento. Five days a week, two nurses take to the streets to care for medically vulnerable residents who live under bridges, in alleys or in tents along the river.
In an ideal world, Jennifer Kent would like to have added 1,000 new dentists across California willing to accept enrollees in Denti-Cal, the state’s low-income dental program, over the past year. Kent, director of the California Department of Health Care Services, the agency that manages the program, has had to settle for a much more modest number: 73 new dentists.
Data released in June by California’s Department of Health Care Services show that nearly 7,000 Medi-Cal patients filed official grievances about “poor provider/staff attitude” in the last three months of 2017, the most recent data available, making it the top quality of care complaint.
Traditionally, the housing and health care industries have viewed one another as distinct. This distinction has prohibited us from seeing our broader intersections with economic, social and racial equity—and the solutions.
Growing up, most of the kids Shannon Albers knew struggled with their mental health.
A member of the Yurok Tribe, Albers, 19, has lived on the Hoopa Valley reservation in Humboldt County for his entire life. And for as long as he can remember, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and substance abuse haunted his peers.
Statistics show kids and teens in Orange County use specialty mental health services at a lower rate than children in most other counties in the state. Fewer than 2 percent of Medi-Cal-enrolled youth under age 21 in Orange County consistently received a specialty mental health service in fiscal year 2015 to 2016.
At the other end of the spectrum are counties like San Francisco, where almost 5 percent of San Francisco’s Medi-Cal enrolled kids came into regular contact with the SMHS system in that time. While the percentage differences appear small, they represent potentially tens of thousands of kids in lower-performing counties who are missing out on mental health care.
The My Birth Matters campaign is aimed at every demographic, but experts are also keenly focused on lowering C-section rates for African-American mothers. Their rate of C-sections is on average 5 percentage points higher than other racial and ethnic groups.
Parents often don’t take talk of suicide by young children seriously because they think kids don’t understand the concept. But they do.