What's Inside the Homeless Assessment Report

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When it comes to homelessness research, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2008 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress is the big dog. It's arguably the most comprehensive and anticipated reports on homeless released each year.

At a data-dense 150 pages, it's no surprise that only a few points are picked up by the media. The story this year, for example, is that suburban and rural homelessness saw increases. While this is an important finding, it hardly captures the depth provided by the report.

In order to gain a more complete understanding of the complexities and stories behind the numbers, I caught up with M William Sermons, the Director of the Homelessness Research Institute at the National Alliance to End Homelessness to learn more about how this report advances our understanding of homelessness in the U.S. and- more importantly- how the numbers can help us end it.

Why should people care about this homelessness data?
As a researcher, I think that there are lots of reasons, but one finding of the report that your readers may find sobering is the finding that more families are showing up in homeless shelters directly from housing that they were buying or renting and other traditionally stable situations. For anyone who has ever said (either seriously or jokingly) that they were one paycheck from being homeless, this data says that this is more true for more people than it was a year ago.

Complete the sentence: "The one thing that people should take away from this report is..."
The one thing people should take away from this report is how swiftly things have changed. When I started as Director of the Homelessness Research Institute last October, my first task was figuring exactly how to document and communicate the large decreases in chronic, family and overall homelessness from 2005 to 2007. Of course, the economy has gotten worse and worse since then and the results of this report reveal a screeching halt to the progress that the homelessness assistance and community had been making prior to the current economic realities.

You're the expert - what surprised you the most after crunching the numbers?
I think that one of the biggest surprises is that the decreases we had begun to see in chronic homelessness didn't continue. Communities across the country are implementing permanent supportive housing programs that permanently end homelessness for many chronically homeless Individuals. In the first half of this year, we've seen a series of studies in prestigious academic journals documenting how cost-effective these programs are. The articles show that people stay housed and use fewer community resources. Because this report also suggests that there's been lots of new permanent supportive housing created since the last report, I would have expected a decrease in chronic homelessness.

What's missing from the report?
What's desperately needed in is information about performance. The current report is essentially a report about inputs and process. It tells us how many shelter beds there are, who used them, and how many homeless people were counted across the country at a single point in time. While you might not know it from reading the report, there are innovations happening in communities across the country. Many communities have implemented programs to keep people from ever entering shelters and those efforts aren't captured in this report. To be able to use the data effectively in the fight to end homelessness we need performance information to tell us what's working and what isn't.

Clearly, this report provides some insight into some recent trends. But now what happens?
Now, the work begins- or should I say continues. Communities across the country have been responding to the situation long before any data was available. In addition to serving more people, those communities have been gearing up for months to implement the new federal Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program. That funding is now making its way to communities, so the next thing to look for is evidence that the prevention money has prevented the big increases we anticipated without it.