Homelessness occurs when people or households are unable to acquire and/or maintain housing they can afford.

The Big Picture
While circumstances can vary, the main reason people experience homelessness is because they cannot find housing they can afford. The main behind this inability to acquire or maintain housing is the scarcity of affordable housing in the United States – particularly in more urban areas where homelessness is more prevalent.

By the numbers:

• There are 643,067 people experiencing homelessness on any given night in the United States.
• Of that number, 238,110 are people in families, and
• 404,957 are individuals.
• 17 percent of the homeless population is considered "chronically homeless," and
• 12 percent of the homeless population - 67,000 - are veterans.

These numbers come from point-in-time counts, which are conducted, community by community, on a single night in January every other year. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires communities to submit this data every other year in order to qualify for federal homeless assistance funds. Many communities conduct counts more regularly.

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Alliance Focus Areas

The Alliance examines four specific groups experiencing homelessness:

• families,
• youth,
• veterans,
• and chronically homeless people.
The Alliance also offers information on rural homelessness, homelessness resulting from domestic violence, mental and physical health as it pertains to homelessness, and homelessness resulting from re-entry.

Families
Homeless families are similar to other poor families.

Typically, families become homeless as a result of some unforeseen financial crisis - a medical emergency, a car accident, a death in the family - that prevents them from being able to hold on to housing.

Most homeless families are able to bounce back from homelessness quickly, with relatively little public assistance. Usually, homeless families require rent assistance, housing placement services, job assistance, and other short-term, one-time services before being able to return to independence and stability.

For more information about homeless families, solutions to family homelessness, and policies addressing the issue, please visit the families section of our website.

Youth
Young people often become homeless due to family conflict, including divorce, neglect, or abuse. A large majority of young people experience short-term homelessness, returning back home or to family/friends. A small minority – an estimated 50,000 youth – experience long-term homelessness.

Youth homelessness presents a particular challenge for several reasons, including the fact that there is very little definitive data on the population, as this group often doesn’t interact with standard homeless assistance programs or government agencies. Moreover, the solutions that have been identified for homelessness in general are often not applicable to minors (who are, for example, ineligible to rent an apartment). These special challenges mean that solutions to youth homelessness require targeted innovation.

There has been specific interest to the LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness who have specific needs and are at heightened risk of harm as compared to their heterosexual homeless youth counterparts.

For more information on homeless youth, please visit the youth section of our website.

Veterans
Veterans often become homeless due to war-related disability. For a variety of reasons – physical disability, mental anguish, post-traumatic stress, etc. – many veterans find difficulty readjusting to civilian life. This inability can translate into unsafe behaviors, including addiction, abuse, and violence. These difficulties, coupled with the unsafe behaviors, can lead to homelessness.

Providing prevention measure, including job placement services, medical services, housing assistance, and the like, can mitigate the risk of veterans experiencing homelessness.

For more information about veteran homelessness, please visit the veteran section of our website.

Chronic Homelessness
Chronic homelessness is often the public face of homelessness. "Chronic" has a specific definition, involving either long-term and/or repeated bouts of homelessness coupled with disability (physical or mental). People experiencing chronic homelessness often end up living in shelters and consume a plurality of the homeless assistance system’s resources.

It’s a common misconception that this group represents the majority of the homelessness population; rather, they account for about 18 percent of the entire homeless population.

Fortunately, there has been significant progress to address chronic homelessness in the last decade; chronic homelessness declined significantly from 2005 to 2009. Unfortunately, that decline has stalled since the onset of the recession.

For more information on chronic homelessness, please visit this section of our website.

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Details and Notes

• It’s important to note that these four groups do not represent the entirety of the homeless population. More information about these smaller groups of people and the issues specific to those demographics can be found in the Issues section of the website.
• The Alliance published a report on the Geography of Homelessness, which examines the prevalence of homelessness in different geographic types: rural, urban, suburban, and those in between.
• In 2000, the Alliance launched the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which informed hundreds of community plans to end homelessness.
• The recession has impacted homelessness. In 2007, the Alliance made a prediction about the projected increase of homelessness resulting from the recession. We issued a report examining those impacts early in 2011.