 It's great to be here this evening and to talk about a very important topic, homelessness. How do we create more solutions? How do we work with the government, with other like-minded organizations to look at this complex issue that we all see and feel and in some cases experience every single day? And that's what this evening is about. There are a lot of people who are fragile and housed and they're becoming fragile and homeless at an alarming rate. We used to say a year ago for every one person that becomes housed, two people fall into homelessness. Now with the new data, it's for every one person housed, three people fall into homelessness. When we did research in 1990, 11% of San Franciscans who were homeless were 50 or older. 2003, 37% were. Right now it's about 50% are 50 and older. This is a hugely problematic issue because it turns out that homeless people who are 50 and older have the health status of people in their 70s and 80s. Health care, housing, they're intimately linked and I literally view homelessness as a medical condition. If you look at what happens to a person who's on the street, the average lifespan is 53 years. That's two and a half decades shorter than the average lifespan of the rest of the country. That is as bad a disease as anything else. It is a health care crisis. I think obviously it's a racial problem, it's a poverty problem. The racial component here is unmistakable and it is undeniable. The question is obviously then posed, well why? It's that the case that more black people are caught in the web of homelessness. And the data that was uncovered through extensive research, it goes to the issue of discrimination in the housing market, it goes to the issue of discrimination in terms of the workplace. Because health care has become so involved in this issue, people really conflate the issue with mental health and substance use and they think that that's the cause of homelessness. The cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing. But right now in California there are 22 housing units available and affordable for every 100 extremely low income households. Nationally there are 35 units and until we solve that underlying problem it's going to be hard to solve the rest of it. It is $4,000 to $700,000 of public subsidy to build a single affordable housing unit in California. It's estimated that it will take until 2035 or 2040 to build enough permanent housing. What do we do in the meantime? We have a tacit public policy in this state that says it's okay to live outdoors. We need a right to a roof over one's head whether it's shelter or longer term housing. Clearly we need more shelter. The question is how we do it in a way that doesn't impede the end result is what we really need is housing. I believe we must declare a state of emergency in the state of California to deal with the crisis that we call homelessness. Nothing short of that will communicate the urgency that we have. This is a multi-dimensional conversation that we need to have multiple solutions. People dying on the streets of California, it's just simply unacceptable.