The Story of Deanna Evans

In the summer, Deana Everhart cooks without a kitchen or a home. In the summer, her home of Fresno, located in the Central Valley in California can reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures, the outdoors act almost as if they were a microwave; leave a TV dinner out on the sidewalk and it'll be ready in 30 minutes. However, as many are able to enjoy the comfort of air conditioning indoors, homeless individuals like Everhart must bear the heat day after day, year after year. As Everhart has grown older over the past 20 years, these heat waves have become more and more frequent and damaging, making it harder to survive. ​

​

Over the past year, Everhart has endured historic winter storms followed by an intensely hot summer, and now faces another potentially severe winter driven by El Niño. At the same time, she’s navigating shifting city policies as Fresno officials try to balance reducing street homelessness with protecting unhoused residents from deadly weather. This struggle reflects a statewide crisis: from 2019 to 2022, unsheltered homelessness in California rose by 6.5%, with Fresno experiencing a far sharper 48% increase — much of it during the first year of the pandemic.​

​

Fresno now experiences 17 more dangerously hot days per year than in 1979, while California as a whole swings between drought and heavy rain — especially in the Central Valley, where intense rainfall can quickly cause flooding. Seniors like Deana Everhart, who live outside, face extreme health risks; being unhoused accelerates aging so much that a 50-year-old on the streets can resemble someone 20–30 years older. Dr. Margot Kushel, who studies homelessness and health, calls unhoused people the “bleeding edge” of climate-driven health crises. A recent survey found that nearly half of single adults experiencing homelessness are now aged 50 or older. For Everhart, living outdoors at her age is simply “hard.”

​

In late spring, anticipating the coming heat, Everhart set up camp under an overpass in downtown Fresno, drawn by the deep shade from the concrete. With her longtime friend Shannon Thom, she built a makeshift camp crowded with carts, strollers stuffed with plastic bags, worn-out chairs, trash, and even a molding sheet cake someone had given them — reflecting how, living on the streets, they’ve learned to accept whatever they get.

​

Though chaotic, Everhart and her friend Shannon’s camp shows their practical street smarts: hiding valuables in trash bags to deter theft and letting trash accumulate to avoid complaints. They take turns sleeping to guard their belongings around the clock. Once a guitarist in an all-girl metal band, Everhart still enjoys the spotlight but now feels self-conscious about her teeth after years of living outdoors. Her homelessness is linked to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, which led to past evictions. Today, she survives on $1,252 a month in disability benefits and food stamps—far less than Fresno’s sharply rising rents, which soared nearly 40% from 2017 to 2021.

​

Despite her own hardships, Everhart worries more about her 39-year-old son, Travis, who has schizophrenia and also lives on the streets. Schizophrenia increases the risk of death in hot temperatures by impairing the brain’s ability to regulate body temperature and make safe choices in extreme heat.  At her camp, she keeps a box of his belongings and a mat where he sleeps when he isn’t wandering. Previously, her son wasn’t allowed to visit when she and her friend had indoor housing because his psychosis caused outbursts, but after Travis suffered a severe sunburn during a heatwave, Everhart gave up her housing to stay close to him. Patrick Weaver, a friend of Travis, was found dead in a parking lot at the end of a month where temperatures averaged over 100 degrees. Everhart believed that extreme heat played a role in the death of Weaver. While the official cause of Weaver's death was drug overdose, Weaver died just days after Fresno hit its second-highest recorded temperature of 114 degrees, and as drugs including meth could significantly raise body temperatures, Everhart believes the rising heat only furthers the issues that many homeless individuals face with substance abuse. 

 

The true number of unhoused people dying from extreme weather remains unclear, since coroners typically do not track housing status; KQED’s public records requests across California returned little data. Still, what is known is troubling: people experiencing homelessness are already three to nine times more likely to die than housed individuals, depending on their age.

 

There’s also growing evidence that extreme weather worsens this risk. For instance, in Los Angeles County last year, unhoused people, who make up less than 1% of the population, accounted for almost half of all heat-related deaths. Similarly, in Sacramento County  in 2021, the death rate from hypothermia for unhoused residents was over 215 times higher than that of the overall county population. 

 

Together, these findings illustrate how climate extremes, health vulnerabilities like schizophrenia, and substance use combine to create deadly conditions for people living on the streets.

​

​

​

​