Dr. Margot Kushel

speaker

117 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 Jul

Dr. Margot Kushel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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It's Been a Minute · Homelessness is more common than you think. · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

I will never hear you say you were homeless.

You were never homeless in your life.

I really do think there's this confusion between unsheltered, visible homelessness and the broad experience of homelessness, which encompasses living in a homeless shelter, some of which look quite like apartments, some not.

look quite like warehouses with people stacked up.

Also with what we sometimes colloquially call couch surfing, or people who move from place to place to place because they don't have really a place to stay.

But that isn't what the public believes is homeless.

I'm calling in from the Bay Area.

And here, like in most of California, about two-thirds of everyone who experiences homelessness is outdoors or in a car or some other.

There are lots of

Uber drivers sleeping in their cars.

There are lots of people who sleep in a tent and then go and work cleaning an office building all night.

And even so, the public will say, if we try to talk about their flight, the public will say, well, that's not what I mean when I talk homeless.

So somehow people have conflated homelessness with visibly mentally ill, whatever that means, and visible substance use.

And that really does not explain most of American homelessness.

Yeah, I mean, I think about it as it's become like the Scarlet H. They've taken those conditions and treated them as if it's a moral failure.

They've then pinned that on anyone with the label homeless.

So you can understand why people don't want to take that label on.

I'm a practicing physician.

And every day that I see patients, I will see someone who's sleeping in their car or

or some other condition that is like meets every federal definition of homelessness, like everybody in like officially by statute or whatever agrees that they're homeless.

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