Is homelessness in America surging or ebbing? It depends not only upon where you are, but who you ask—and what, precisely, you’re looking for.
Should you live in a big, high-cost city like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the number of people living in homelessness is exploding: In those metros, tent cities full of those priced out by soaring housing costs have created a major crisis for local leaders. Overall national figures from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, however, tell a different story. At the end of 2017, HUD announced that with the exception of really expensive areas, homelessness had continued to decline across the United States, a 13.1 percent decrease since 2010. When it comes to families with children experiencing homelessness, HUD reported a drop of 5.4 percent since 2016, continuing a 27 percent decline since 2010.
And yet according to many homeless service providers, these HUD figures belie not only their experience, but also data collected by other federal agencies, which use less narrow definitions for homelessness. For example, the U.S. Department of Education counted 1.2 million students experiencing homelessness in 2015—a 19 percent increase from the 2010-11 school year. The number of children experiencing homelessness reported by Head Start, which is administered through the Department of Health and Human Services, nearly doubled between 2006 and 2016. While popular portrayals of the homeless typically feature individuals living on the streets or in shelters, advocates say there’s a growing crisis of family homelessness in the U.S., one that’s been rendered invisible by HUD’s refusal to count those in need who are living in motels or doubling up with others.
[For more on this story by RACHEL M. COHEN, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...ess-families/565583/]
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