Who Is Homeless in America?

It is widely supposed that federal data on who is and isn't homeless is somewhat less than accurate. Many homeless individuals don't fill out the Census, and those who are living in motels or doubled up with family and friends aren't even included in the federal definition of homelessness from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which says that a "homeless person" is "an individual who lacks a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence" or whose primary residence is "a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter," "an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized" or "a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings."

HUD's most recent data, compiled in the just-released Annual Homeless Assessment Report (pdf), was compiled in a point-in-time count in more than 1,000 cities on a night in January 2009. It found that 643,000 people were homeless in America. Good to know — but to transition them into housing and to prevent others from becoming homeless, it's important to know who these people are and why they became homeless in the first place. That data comes from a great analysis from, of all places, Mortgage News Daily.

More than 60 percent of those 643,000 were spending the night in shelters or transitional housing. A whopping 37 percent were living outdoors, in abandoned buildings, in cars or some other "public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings."

About 111,000 of them were "chronically homeless," which means that they were alone, suffering from a disability of some sort and had been homeless for a year or more. These are the people who have become the stereotype that much of the general public evokes when thinking of "the homeless." These are the people who are most likely to sleep outdoors.

About 40 percent of adults spending the night in shelters were suffering from a disability, a blanket term that includes substance abuse issues and mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. Four percent had HIV/AIDS. While homelessness can certainly spark and/or exacerbate disabilities, it's often the disabilities that come first, making it hard for people to work and keep their homes.

Sixty thousand of the homeless counted in the survey were veterans, well under the Veterans Affairs Department's estimate that there are 107,000 vets homeless each night. As women have stepped up to increased responsibility in the Armed Forces, female veterans are increasingly at risk of becoming homeless, and taking dependent children with them.

Homeless youth were probably also undercounted, since they amounted to less than one percent in the point-in-time count. It seems that runaways and teens who age out of foster care aren't finding their way to shelters.

Single mothers made up the majority of the 240,000-strong homeless family population, a subgroup that's on the rise. These families generally consist of a mother in her 20s and two young children. Almost all of them live in shelters. In addition to the obstacles of homelessness as a whole, homeless students consistently fare worse than their housed peers. About 12 percent of those counted were domestic violence victims, including a large portion of mothers in shelters. It's not uncommon for victims to return to the abuser for the purpose of having a place to live when their stays are up at shelters.

The White House released the first ever federal plan to end homelessness last month. It includes goals to end veteran and chronic homelessness in five years and family and youth homelessness in 10. The hope is that this data will help officials target populations in need. The problem is, homelessness doesn't discriminate. The people in need include individuals from every age group, race and ethnicity, marital status, sexual orientation, educational level, etc. At least now they've been counted.

Photo credit: Franco Folini