The following 10 images offer unusually intimate, eerie portraits of the places, though not necessarily the exact spots, where homeless people spent their final moments in Orange County in 20. It’s thus more crucial than ever to shine a light on homeless people’s health, lack of medical care, and the circumstances of their deaths. With homeless life expectancy ranging between 42 and 52, and so many rounding this milestone, the time for meaningful intervention is fast disappearing. Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco, who studies homeless health and regularly treats middle-aged people for advanced geriatric illnesses.
Half of the nation’s chronically homeless are now over 50, and they suffer from accelerated aging-dying of ordinary conditions such as heart disease and cancer as many as 25 years earlier than the rest of us. But another explanation is the historically unprecedented graying of our homeless population. Similarly, the homeless death count has risen in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Clara, and San Diego counties in recent years.Ī significant contributor to the increase is drug overdose, which has replaced HIV as the primary homeless epidemic, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In affluent Orange County, homeless deaths rose 74 percent in 2015 from the year before, reaching 188. Such ordinary places tell extraordinary stories of a health crisis and premature mortality amid surging death rates.
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