California’s Prop 47 Raised Homelessness

A new PPIC causal analysis finds California’s 2014 Proposition 47 — which downgraded many drug and property felonies to misdemeanors — was followed by about a 10% rise in unsheltered homelessness (≈7,000 people), an ~8% rise in serious drug use, and a ~20% drop in treatment admissions driven by the collapse of criminal‑justice referrals. The study links reduced enforcement and far fewer felony arrests to severed referral pipelines that had been a major entry point to treatment for addicted, unhoused people. — Shows criminal‑justice reform can have large, unintended public‑health and public‑order effects if it removes institutional referral pathways without replacing them with accessible treatment alternatives.