It is common knowledge in the homeless assistance field that veterans are overrepresented in the overall homeless population. And while the reasons for this, which have to do both with their military service and with who serves in the military, remain a subject of open debate, perhaps the most perplexing question is how we as a country have tolerated veteran homelessness for so long.

That is changing. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki are pursuing a specific plan to end veteran homelessness, and congress has come up with the resources to fund it. Now HUD-VASH, SSVF, and other programs are providing permanent supportive housing, rapid re-housing, and other interventions to fight the problem of homelessness among veterans and their families.And for the past few years, the overall number of homeless veterans has declined, even as service members return from wars in the Middle East to an economy without enough jobs.

And we at the Alliance have been tracking that progress. We’ve found that a number of communities have made significant progress. We’re immensely grateful to the following communities that have achieved reductions in veteran homelessness of at least one-third since 2011.

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Back in February,  about 900 advocates, practitioners, and officials convened in Seattle for two days of sharing innovative practices and new research on family and youth homelessness at the Alliance’s 2013 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness. These are the keynote remarks delivered by the Alliance's President and CEO Nan Roman at that conference.

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One of the roles of the Homelessness Research Institute (HRI), the research and education arm of the Alliance, is to track trends in the homelessness population in communities across the country in an effort to document progress in ending homelessness.

Every Continuum of Care (CoC) in the country recently participated in HUD mandated point-in-time counts of their sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations. These enumeration efforts do not provide a precise count of homeless people, but they do provide a regular way of measuring progress in ending homelessness over time.

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Last night, some Alliance staff and I joined thousands of volunteers nationwide who participated this month in the 2013 Point-in-Time Count. (This year’s count was unique because Continuums of Care (CoCs) are required to report the numbers of youth aged 18 to 24 they encountered.) The purpose of the count is to reach an accurate estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness, so that  HUD can target funding for services where the need is greatest.

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As volunteers across the country take part in their communies' Point-In-Time Counts, braving lousy weather and chilly temperatures, walking streets well after midnight in an effort to find and count unsheltered persons experiencing homelessness, the media has taken notice.

This week and last week articles about local counts have been popping up in newspapers all over the country, and recently, the Alliance President and CEO Nan Roman spoke with Nevada Public Radio about homelessness and the PIT Count in Las Vegas.  Also, one of the Alliance's guest bloggers, Jimmy Ramirez, a formerly homeless youth appeared on MSNBC, when the Melissa Harris-Perry show did a segment on youth homelessness.

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On Monday, December 10, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released national numbers from the January 2012 Point-In-Time (PIT) Counts, which give an estimate of the number of people sleeping in shelters and other housing for homeless people and also in places not meant for human habitation (aka “the streets”) at a single point in time. In this case, that point in time was mid-January, 2012.

Since a lot of people around the country are entering the final month of preparation for the 2013 PIT count, I want to start by saying that having these numbers every year has turned out to be extremely important. The enumeration is not perfect. But PIT Counts have become more rigorous over the years, and we believe they provide a reliable and worthwhile estimate.

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Since the implementation of Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, we have made good progress in ending homelessness for veterans and the chronically homeless, and along the way have learned a lot about what works. As we move forward, we want to be sure that preventing and ending homelessness among unaccompanied youth is a priority at both the national and local levels. Getting better data on this population is the first step in making progress towards that goal.

In the past, HUD’s homeless assistance grants programs defined youth as persons less than 18 years old, and adults as persons 18 years of age and above. We realized, however, that this definition didn't allow us to really understand how many young people are homeless and what their specific needs are.

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