Data + Research: Video Fact Sheet

written by naehblog
October 6, 2009
Hello, everyone! Apologies for the hiatus over the last week. But today, we make it up to you by launching our very first video fact sheet. A lot of times, we get asked this question: How many homeless people are there? And while that may seem like a simple question to answer, it’s actually more complicated than it seems. It’s not easy to count homeless people, so there are a lot of estimates. It depends on how you define “homelessness”. It depends on the groups you’re interested in – most people think of single adult men when they picture homelessness, but there are also families and children and veterans. There’s also different methodology – the Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that all communities count homeless persons in their area every other year, but people count in different ways, so the number should account for that. And we get variations of the question, too. How many people are homeless in a specific community? How many people who are homeless have a serious disorder? How many people are disabled? How many are youth? How many qualify for federal assistance – and of those, who’s accessing federal assistance? So it’s actually a pretty complicated answer – and sometimes it can be hard to understand. But luckily for you, the director of the Homelessness Research Institute – M William Sermons – put together this great video fact sheet explaining the numbers in an easy, understandable way. Check it out. And hey, we want to do more of these in the future so if you’re hankering for an answer to a homelessness-related question, feel free to give us a shout!