SANTA MONICA, Calif. (NY Times) — Their bodies were found on public benches, lying next to bike paths, crumpled under freeway overpasses and stranded on the sun-drenched beach. Across Los Angeles County last year, the unsheltered died in record numbers, an average of five homeless deaths a day, most in plain view of the world around them.
Two hundred eighty-seven homeless people took their last breath on the sidewalk, 24 died in alleys and 72 were found on the pavement, according to data from the county coroner. They were a small fraction of the thousands of homeless people across the country who die each year.
“It’s like a wartime death toll in places where there is no war,” said Maria Raven, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco who co-wrote a study about homeless deaths.
An epidemic of deaths on the streets of American cities has accelerated as the homeless population has aged and the cumulative toll of living and sleeping outdoors has shortened lives. The wider availability of fentanyl, a particularly fast-acting and dangerous drug, has been a major cause of the rising death toll, but many homeless people are dying young of treatable chronic illnesses like heart disease.
More than ever it has become deadly to be homeless in America, especially for men in their 50s and 60s, who typically make up the largest cohort of despair. In many cities the number of homeless deaths doubled during the pandemic, a time when seeking medical care became more difficult, housing costs continued to rise and when public health authorities were preoccupied with combating the coronavirus.
Austin, Denver, Indianapolis, Nashville and Salt Lake City are among the cities where officials and homeless advocates have said they have been alarmed by the rising number of deaths.
But the crisis is most acute in California, where about one in four of the nation’s 500,000 homeless people lives.

The process of tallying homeless deaths is painstaking, involving the cross-referencing of homeless databases and death reports. But based on data from the handful of California’s 58 counties that report homeless deaths, experts said that 4,800 is a conservative estimate for last year.
In Los Angeles County, the homeless population grew by 50 percent from 2015 to 2020. Homeless deaths have grown at a far faster rate, an increase of about 200 percent during the same period to nearly 2,000 deaths in the county last year.
“These are profoundly lonely deaths,” said David Modersbach, who led the first public study of homeless deaths in Alameda County across the Bay from San Francisco.
In some cases, bodies are left undiscovered for hours. Others are unclaimed at the morgue despite efforts to reach family members. In San Francisco, where people sleeping in cardboard boxes, tents and other makeshift shelters are a common sight, the body of a homeless man who died on a traffic median last spring lay for more than 12 hours before being retrieved. “Guy lay dead here & no one noticed,” said a cardboard sign left at the scene.
Those who sleep on the streets speak of the wear that it imposes on the body, of several untreated illnesses and the loneliness of being surrounded by pedestrians who ignore you.