Homelessness in the United States

At the beginning of each year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that each Continuum of Care (CoC)—community programs charged with providing support to homeless individuals—conduct a Point-in-Time (PIT) count. These counts are conducted by volunteers on a single night in January. Typically, in odd years, both sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations are counted, and in even years only sheltered homeless are. This project utilizes data from the 2022 PIT count and a 2019 shape-file illustrating existing CoCs.

Point-in-Time counts are not perfect—a single day of counting and a handful of volunteers cannot account for all experiencing homelessness. A goal of this project was to map all CoCs that exist in predominantly rural areas. Homeless populations in rural areas are difficult to see; rural regions are expansive and many individuals experiencing homelessness take shelter in abandoned or hard-to-reach areas. Common misconceptions surrounding homelessness as an "urban issue" also contribute to the difficulties of counting rural homeless populations.

Side-note: Despite this data originating from 2022, unsheltered homeless are included. The unsheltered homeless population in 2022 totaled 233,832, which is about 40% of the overall homeless population (582,462).

The general goals of a Continuum of Care are to provide outreach, intake and assessment, emergency shelter, transitional housing with supportive housing, and permanent or permanent supportive housing to those struggling with homelessness. Many communities, especially larger, more urban ones, have their own CoC programs. However, for smaller towns and rural areas, a state typically sets up one large, encompassing CoC. These state CoCs, or Balances of State, are found in predominantly rural, sometimes suburban, areas.

Overall, 107 out of 385 (about 28%) Continuums of Care are in rural areas. The 2022 count resulted in an estimate of 578,864 homeless individuals, nearly 90,000 of which were from rural CoCs—16% (roughly 1/5) of homeless individuals are in rural Continuums of Care. The largest rural CoC is the Texas Balance of State CoC, shown by the red marker, with 7,054 individuals.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness calls for a coordinated systems approach when it comes to ending homelessness by delivering services, housing, and programs. This approach is aided by local data which results in strategic, community-based responses tailored to each area's unique needs. With greater data capture, misconceptions about which areas in the United States typically contain homeless populations can be resolved. The maps above demonstrate that homelessness exists throughout the entirety of the U.S.—in major cities, small suburban towns, or largely rural areas. Hopefully maps such as these, maps that illustrate that homelessness exists everywhere, could be utilized to promote more cohesive and well-planned community actions.

For a future project, or continuation of this one, I would like to map homeless populations by gender, race, and sexual orientation as  women ,  minority groups , and members of the  LGBTQIA+  (especially transgender youth) are typically undercounted or suffer disproportionately from homelessness than their white, straight, and male counterparts.

Cleaning the data by hand, I was able to recognize certain patterns such as Balance of State CoCs typically exist in rural areas, or that Major City CoCs typically had larger, more concrete homeless counts.