Broad national assessments of homelessness were undertaken by several agencies and organizations during the 1980s and mid-1990s, including A Report to the Secretary on the Homeless and Emergency Shelters (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1984), America's Homeless: Numbers, Characteristics, and Programs that Serve Them (Martha Burt and Barbara Cohen, Washingt…
The ordinary citizen, hearing of the homeless, envisions people, including children, who live on the street permanently and sleep in cardboard boxes under bridges or in cars. There are, of course, people in this category, but they are the minority among the homeless. HUD has labeled such people the chronically homeless and estimates their number at around 150,000, close to the number of people cou…
People living below the poverty threshold decreased between 1984 and 1989 from 33.7 to 31.5 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This population then increased to 39.3 million by 1993, declining after that year to 31.6 million people in 2000 during the boom of the 1990s, and rising again to 35.9 million in 2003. (See Table 2.2.) Whether using a low or high estimate of the number of homele…
Studies of homeless people and surveys of officials knowledgeable about homeless clients conducted in the 1990s and 2000s have shown similar patterns of gender and racial data for the homeless, although the percentages varied from study to study. Data collected for the 2004 U.S. Conference of Mayors survey showed that in almost all cities surveyed, single males greatly outnumbered single females a…
Homeless children and youths have always received special attention from the public and from welfare agencies. In the terminology of the nineteenth century, children are considered "worthy" poor, because if they were homeless, they did nothing to deserve that status. Estimates provided by the U.S. Conference of Mayors provide some indication of the proportion of children and runaway …
Most homeless people will become homeless again. The Urban Institute's 1996 study showed that 51% of all homeless persons surveyed in that year had been homeless before. The AGRM found in their 2004 survey that 65% of the homeless had been homeless before, 26% had been homeless once before, 18% had been homeless twice before, and 21% had been homeless three or more times before. (See Table …
Most studies on the homeless have been focused on urban areas, leaving the impression that this problem exists only on city sidewalks. Homelessness is more common in the cities, where the bulk of the population resides, but many areas of rural America also experience the phenomenon. Rural communities have fewer official shelters and fewer public places (heating grates, subways, or train stations, …
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