In 2023, there were about ******* homeless people estimated to be living in the United States, the highest number of homeless people recorded within the provided time period. In comparison, the second-highest number of homeless people living in the U.S. within this time period was in 2007, at *******. How is homelessness calculated? Calculating homelessness is complicated for several different reasons. For one, it is challenging to determine how many people are homeless as there is no direct definition for homelessness. Additionally, it is difficult to try and find every single homeless person that exists. Sometimes they cannot be reached, leaving people unaccounted for. In the United States, the Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates the homeless population by counting the number of people on the streets and the number of people in homeless shelters on one night each year. According to this count, Los Angeles City and New York City are the cities with the most homeless people in the United States. Homelessness in the United States Between 2022 and 2023, New Hampshire saw the highest increase in the number of homeless people. However, California was the state with the highest number of homeless people, followed by New York and Florida. The vast amount of homelessness in California is a result of multiple factors, one of them being the extreme high cost of living, as well as opposition to mandatory mental health counseling and drug addiction. However, the District of Columbia had the highest estimated rate of homelessness per 10,000 people in 2023. This was followed by New York, Vermont, and Oregon.

The graph displays the top 15 states by an estimated number of homeless people in the United States for the year 2025. The x-axis represents U.S. states, while the y-axis shows the number of homeless individuals in each state. California has the highest homeless population with 187,084 individuals, followed by New York with 158,019, while Hawaii places last in this dataset with 11,637. This bar graph highlights significant differences across states, with some states like California and New York showing notably higher counts compared to others, indicating regional disparities in homelessness levels across the country.

Novel and comprehensive cross-sectional datasets were developed to document and measure city level homeless policies across issue area. The dataset is comprised of the 100 largest cities in the United States, including FIPS identifiers and matched Continuum of Care (CoC) level identifiers by CoC number associated with the city. The datasets include city-level homeless policies in the 100 largest cities across the issues of homeless plans; housing plans with mentions of homelessness; homeless outreach teams; and the role of sanitation in homeless policy. Each dataset includes sub-codes to evaluate the governance structure and policy goals of each type of city-level homeless policy. Primary data were collected in 2021 and 2022. Please see the attached publications for complete methodology and data collection procedures for each policy type.

Context

This database contains the data reported in the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress (AHAR). It represents a point-In-time count (PIT) of homeless individuals, as well as a housing inventory count (HIC) conducted annually.

The data represent the most comprehensive national-level assessment of homelessness in America, including PIT and HIC estimates of homelessness, as well as estimates of chronically homeless persons, homeless veterans, and homeless children and youth.

These data can be trended over time and correlated with other metrics of housing availability and affordability, in order to better understand the particular type of housing resources that may be needed from a social determinants of health perspective.

HUD captures these data annually through the Continuum of Care (CoC) program. CoC-level reporting data have been crosswalked to county levels for purposes of analysis of this dataset.

Querying BigQuery tables

You can use the BigQuery Python client library to query tables in this dataset in Kernels. Note that methods available in Kernels are limited to querying data. Tables are at bigquery-public-data.sdoh_hud_pit_homelessness

Sample Query

What has been the change in the number of homeless veterans in the state of New York’s CoC Regions since 2012? Determine how the patterns of homeless veterans have changes across the state of New York

homeless_2018 AS ( SELECT Homeless_Veterans AS Vet18, CoC_Name
FROM bigquery-public-data.sdoh_hud_pit_homelessness.hud_pit_by_coc WHERE SUBSTR(CoC_Number,0,2) = "NY" AND Count_Year = 2018 ),

veterans_change AS ( SELECT homeless_2012.COC_Name, Vet12, Vet18, Vet18 - Vet12 AS VetChange FROM homeless_2018 JOIN homeless_2012 ON homeless_2018.CoC_Name = homeless_2012.CoC_Name )

SELECT * FROM veterans_change

Homeless and battered women's shelters compiled from Reference USA. Reference USA is an internet-based reference service from the Government Division of InfoGroup. This site was designed as a reference to government agencies. ReferenceUSAGov database contains more than 57 million US businesses, 320 million residents, and 855,000 healthcare providers. InfoGroup compiles information from public sources, including yellow pages and business white pages telephone directories, annual reports, federal government data, leading business magazines trade newsletters, major newspapers, industry and specialty directories, and postal service information. Over 350 database specialists make phone calls to verify information on business and healthcare providers in the database, placing in excess of 24 million phone calls annually.

Content

This dataset includes the daily number of families and individuals residing in the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter system and the daily number of families applying to the DHS shelter system.

Context

This is a dataset hosted by the City of New York. The city has an open data platform found here and they update their information according the amount of data that is brought in. Explore New York City using Kaggle and all of the data sources available through the City of New York organization page!

• Update Frequency: This dataset is updated daily.

Acknowledgements

This dataset is maintained using Socrata's API and Kaggle's API. Socrata has assisted countless organizations with hosting their open data and has been an integral part of the process of bringing more data to the public.

Cover photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash
Unsplash Images are distributed under a unique Unsplash License.

Presents the number of individuals for each shelter facility type by borough and community district

"Ratio of Homeless Population to General Population in major US Cities in 2009.

*This represents a list of large U.S. cities with a similar street count methodology for which DHS was able to confirm a recent Census; 2009 results are not yet available for LA, SF, and Chicago. All population figures are from the 2007 U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimate."

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.

COVID-19 homeless impact

*Note: Beginning March 1, 2020, all existing reports publicly accessible on web pages belonging to the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) must comply with the CDSS Data De-identification Guidelines in order to more fully protect the identities of the vulnerable clients we serve. Communities with data values of less than 11 have been removed to comply with the CDSS Data De-identification Guidelines.*

The Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership is a voluntary federal-state enterprise created for the purpose of merging employee, and employer data to provide a set of enhanced labor market statistics known collectively as Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI). The QWI are a set of economic indicators including employment, job creation, earnings, and other measures of employment flows. For the purposes of this dataset, LED data for 2018 is aggregated to Census Summary Level 070 (State + County + County Subdivision + Place/Remainder), and joined with the Emergency Solutions Grantee (ESG) areas spatial dataset for FY2018. The Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG), formally the Emergency Shelter Grants, program is designed to identify sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons, as well as those at risk of homelessness, and provide the services necessary to help those persons quickly regain stability in permanent housing after experiencing a housing crisis and/or homelessness. The ESG is a non-competitive formula grant awarded to recipients which are state governments, large cities, urban counties, and U.S. territories. Recipients make these funds available to eligible sub-recipients, which can be either local government agencies or private nonprofit organizations. The recipient agencies and organizations, which actually run the homeless assistance projects, apply for ESG funds to the governmental grantee, and not directly to HUD. Please note that this version of the data does not include Community Planning and Development (CPD) entitlement grantees. LED data for CPD entitlement areas can be obtained from the LED for CDBG Grantee Areas feature service. To learn more about the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership visit: https://lehd.ces.census.gov/, for questions about the spatial attribution of this dataset, please reach out to us at GISHelpdesk@hud.gov. Data Dictionary: DD_LED for ESG Grantee Areas

Date of Coverage: ESG-2021/LED-2018

This study examines the spatial patterns of homelessness and resources for the homeless population in Louisville, KY with the goal of identifying where homeless populations are located in relation to resources. Working with census data and some of the resources for the homeless, this study uncovers the realities that the homeless face in different parts of the city. This research research was made as a senior thesis for the University of Louisville's department of Geographic and Environmental Sciences. Table 1. Income and Poverty between the United States and Louisville/Jefferson County metro government, Kentucky in 2019 (United States Census Bureau 2021)Homeless people are thought of as less than full citizens. Whether the rest of the city's people agree or disagree, they are citizens, and should have rights to the city as much as everyone else. The opioid crisis, unmanaged mental illnesses, lack of employment, and other issues like limitations on affordable housing have increased the population of homeless people in Louisville in recent years (Reed 2021). More than 1.5 million children experience homelessness in the United States (Poverty USA 2019). The poverty rate in Louisville, Kentucky is 15.9%, and 1 in 10 renters were facing eviction as of 2019. The 2019 Point In Time Count shows that on a randomly picked night in Louisville, 1071 of the city's people are experiencing homelessness, which is an increase of 15% from the 2018 count (Coalition for the Homeless 2019). The previous data compared to the count for 2020 of 1102 people, shows a trend in increasing homeless population (Coalition for the Homeless 2020).

List of centers where homeless people are provided with hot meals, showers, medical help and a place to sleep

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.

The Continuum of Care (CoC) Homeless Assistance Programs administered by HUD award funds competitively and require the development of a Continuum of Care system in the community where assistance is being sought. A continuum of care system is designed to address the critical problem of homelessness through a coordinated community-based process of identifying needs and building a system to address those needs. The approach is predicated on the understanding that homelessness is not caused merely by a lack of shelter, but involves a variety of underlying, unmet needs - physical, economic, and social. Funds are granted based on the competition following the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA).To learn more about the CoC Program visit: https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/, for more information about CoC program data, visit https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/coc-program-reports-program-data-and-program-rents/, for questions about the spatial attribution of this dataset, please reach out to us at GISHelpdesk@hud.gov. Data Dictionary: DD_Continuum of CareDate of Coverage: FY 2024

May 29, 2014

Dear Colleague:

May is National Foster Care Month, a time for our Nation to reaffirm its commitment to America’s children. Last year, roughly 200,000 young people entered into foster care because of abuse and/or neglect. Inadequate housing was a factor in many of these cases. In fact, every year, inadequate housing contributes to the removal of 22,000 children from their families. This can have lasting consequences for young people.

Research shows that children facing housing instability, homelessness, and poverty are more likely to be involved in the child welfare system. When a family is living in distressed conditions or experiencing homelessness, it can affect their ability to care for their kids, and it can have a negative impact on the ability of kids to learn in school, maintain good health, and keep their hope for the future. With this in mind, it is critical that we do everything we can to provide them with the safe and stable housing they need to succeed.

To achieve this goal, it is critical that all of us—Federal agencies, public housing authorities, Continuums of Care, and local child welfare agencies—closely collaborate with each other. The needs of families are diverse. Some need intensive support and long-term access to appropriate services. Others simply need financial assistance to care for their children. In many cases, neither child welfare agencies nor programs aimed at preventing homelessness can meet all of these needs alone.

The programs authorized by title IV-B of the Social Security Act provide a limited pool of funds to prevent the removal of children from their homes or to help those in foster care reunite with their families. In general, states use title IV-B funds for short-term, crisis-driven interventions and services, which may include one-time assistance with housing, utilities, or other related housing costs. For many of these families, gaining access to reliable housing supports, such as provided through HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) or public housing programs, can provide the key to a stable future.

We know that families are more likely to remain housed if they have a targeted service paired with appropriate housing that meets their needs. Through close collaboration, child welfare agencies and public housing agencies can provide these paired services to keep families and youth in safe and appropriate housing. One example is HUD’s Family Unification Program (FUP).

A special purpose voucher program, FUP demonstrates how local partnerships can address housing needs for families using child welfare services and youth aging out of foster care. Similarly, public housing agencies and child welfare agencies can come together to establish a local preference for families referred by child welfare and couple this housing assistance with supportive services. Child welfare agencies can also collaborate with private multifamily housing owners that provide HUD-assisted rental assistance, or by partnering with state or local housing agencies to develop local affordable housing through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and HUD’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program. Together, child welfare agencies, housing agencies, and Continuums of Care can create an array of housing interventions to serve these children, youth, and families better.

Currently, The Children’s Bureau has two sets of grants aimed at providing more information about successful housing interventions for these vulnerable families. One develops strategies for homeless youth and the other targets homeless families. HUD and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families will continue working together to develop and disseminate information about promising practices and strategies for serving this population.

Opening Doors: The Federal Strategic Plan to End Homelessness recognizes the critical needs of youth and families by designating them as two prio

The Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership is a voluntary federal-state enterprise created for the purpose of merging employee, and employer data to provide a set of enhanced labor market statistics known collectively as Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI). The QWI are a set of economic indicators including employment, job creation, earnings, and other measures of employment flows. For the purposes of this dataset, LED data for 2018 is aggregated to Census Summary Level 070 (State + County + County Subdivision + Place/Remainder), and joined with the Continuum of Care Program grantee areas spatial dataset for FY2017. The Continuum of Care (CoC) Homeless Assistance Programs administered by HUD award funds competitively and require the development of a Continuum of Care system in the community where assistance is being sought. A continuum of care system is designed to address the critical problem of homelessness through a coordinated community-based process of identifying needs and building a system to address those needs. The approach is predicated on the understanding that homelessness is not caused merely by a lack of shelter, but involves a variety of underlying, unmet needs - physical, economic, and social. Funds are granted based on the competition following the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA). Please note that this version of the data does not include Community Planning and Development (CPD) entitlement grantees. LED data for CPD entitlement areas can be obtained from the LED for CDBG Grantee Areas feature service. To learn more about the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership visit: https://lehd.ces.census.gov/, for questions about the spatial attribution of this dataset, please reach out to us at GISHelpdesk@hud.gov. Data Dictionary: DD_LED for CoC Grantee Areas

Date of Coverage: CoC-2021/LED-2018

this graph was created in PowerBi,R and Loocker studio:

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This topic page studies available data and empirical evidence on homelessness, focusing specifically on how it affects people in high-income countries. Homeless people are among the most vulnerable groups in high-income countries.

You can read our topic page on Extreme Poverty if you are interested in a broader perspective on economic deprivation and a perspective beyond high-income countries.

Homeless people in the US What data is available? One of the most common ways to measure homelessness is through so-called 'point-in-time' counts of people who are sleeping in shelters or on the streets. These are figures that are intended to reflect the number of people who are homeless 'on any given night'.

The main source of point-in-time estimates in the US is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which releases the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress (AHARC). They calculate 'point-in-time' estimates by counting homeless people in late January of each year.

The main underlying sources of data used to produce the figures published in the AHARC are (i) registries from shelters and (ii) counts and estimates of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons provided by care organizations, as part of their applications for government funding.

The counts from the care organizations (called 'Continuums of Care' in the US) come from active counts that are undertaken at the community level, by walking around the streets, using pre-established methodologies.1

In these figures, 'Sheltered Homelessness' refers to people who are staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing programs, or safe havens. 'Unsheltered Homelessness', on the other hand, refers to people whose primary nighttime residence is a public or private place not designated for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for people – for example, the streets, vehicles, or parks.2

Due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) approved the Maricopa Regional Continuum of Care to opt out of the unsheltered Point In Time (PIT) Homeless Count for 2021. Every January, volunteers and outreach teams from local communities collaborate to survey and count the number of homeless. persons in their respective locations. With the information provided by the PIT Count, the Maricopa Regional Continuum of Care and local communities can determine how best to address homelessness. For more information see https://www.azmag.gov/Programs/Homelessness/Point-In-Time-Homeless-Count">https://www.azmag.gov/Programs/Homelessness/Point-In-Time-Homeless-Count.

NOTE: The HUD definition of chronic homelessness is: (1) a person who lives in a place not meant for human habitation, Safe Haven, or Emergency Shelter, (2) has a disability, and (3) has been homeless continuously for one year OR four or more times homeless in the last three years, where the combined length of time homeless is at least 12 months.

**Mesa 2025 Data: 6 interactions documented in cities outside of Mesa. Geolocation confirmed interactions occurred in Mesa, versus documented city. Dataset manually updated to reflect correct interaction location and correct PIT counts reflected in https://maricopacoc.org/data/point-in-time-count/">Maricopa Regional Continuum of Care .

The Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG), formally the Emergency Shelter Grants, program is designed to identify sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons, as well as those at risk of homelessness, and provide the services necessary to help those persons quickly regain stability in permanent housing after experiencing a housing crisis and/or homelessness. The ESG is a non-competitive formula grant awarded to recipients which are state governments, large cities, urban counties, and U.S. territories. Recipients make these funds available to eligible sub-recipients, which can be either local government agencies or private nonprofit organizations. The recipient agencies and organizations, which actually run the homeless assistance projects, apply for ESG funds to the governmental grantee, and not directly to HUD. To learn more about the Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) Program visit: https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/esg/, for questions about the spatial attribution of this dataset, please reach out to us at GISHelpdesk@hud.gov. Data Dictionary: DD_ESG Grantee Areas

Date of Coverage: 2018