Martha Burt, principal research associate in the Urban Institute's Center on Labor, Human Services and Population, is a leading expert on homelessness in America. An author of Helping America's Homeless: Emergency shelter or affordable housing?" (UI Press, 2001), she has conducted studies for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that identify and describe promising approaches to ending and preventing homelessness. HUD released "Strategies for Reducing Chronic Street Homelessness" —the second in the series — in January 2004. Although no community has yet ended homelessness, the report documents community-wide approaches that are moving in the right direction.

Five Questions Archives

The most important thing to know is that we have no recent data. There have been only two national studies and the Urban Institute took part in both. The first was in 1987 and only went to big cities. The second, in 1996, included every part of the country—urban, suburban, and rural. Quite a few communities around the country do their own surveys and have more current numbers, but their data are not national.

From the 1996 national study we estimated that between 446,000 to 840,000 people are homeless at any given time. We can also project that one in ten poor people experience at least one night of homelessness in the course of a year, and that includes poor children. You don't get one in ten persons becoming homeless as a matter of personal vulnerability alone. Such a high rate of homelessness definitely speaks to structural problems. Homelessness is not going to be solved without addressing those structural problems.

Aside from the issue of numbers, I don't think you're going to find big changes in the characteristics of homeless people since '96. It was pretty remarkable that between the '87 and '96 studies, the proportion of men and women, families versus singles, and people with various disabilities remained quite constant. The average length of time that people were homeless shrank a bit, slightly more people had completed high school, and slightly fewer were white. But these changes were no more than 5 percent up or down. These characteristics were really very stable.

During that interval, a few shifts on access to public benefits did occur, and they were clearly the result of policy changes. Many more people had food stamps in '96 than in '87, and average household income was higher because more people—notably families—received welfare. Since '96 the focus on solving chronic homelessness has greatly expanded and more resources are going into permanent housing for people who were chronically homeless. As a result, if there were a national study today, you would see fewer people on the streets with long-term chronic problems.

2. Should we know more?

Naturally we should know more. It's really pretty disgraceful to have to say that we have no national data since 1996. And I get asked all the time for updates.

There is a national effort spearheaded by HUD for communities across the country to install homeless management information systems, partly to get national data without having to mount a national survey. The hope—and it is a hope rather than an expectation—is that it will at least make it possible to do a national count and get some basic information about gender, family structure (whether single or families), ages of children, racial/ethnic breakdown, and location around the country. But that's the core.

HUD will report to Congress this year on homeless management information systems, but the information will not be in any way complete because many systems around the country are just getting started. By early next year [2006], we may be able to begin to see some pay off.

3. Who is most at risk of becoming homeless?

Fundamentally, very poor people—those at lower than 50 percent of the poverty line. The more personal vulnerabilities the poor have, the more likely to become homeless. So if you have a mental illness, if you abuse alcohol or drugs, if you're physically sick, if you have AIDS, or if you have physical disabilities that make it difficult to work—those are all major risk factors.

Other risk factors are related to the first set. So if you've been institutionalized, either in mental hospitals or corrections facilities, especially for a long time, the probability of becoming homeless very quickly after release is fairly high.

About 25 percent of those who experience homelessness have spent some time in foster care or other out-of-home placements. The issue of youth homelessness is pretty significant in terms of predicting who will be chronically homeless as adults. These youth have few ties, or no ties, and most have a history of abuse—both physical and sexual. This makes them very poor candidates for stable relationships, with either partners or friends who could help them get out of homelessness and create a stable home life.

4. What services for the homeless help alleviate the problem?

The real push has been on permanent solutions. Communities are thinking about shrinking emergency shelters. They don't want people to have to stay in these shelters for very long because they don't really do much good.

There are new kinds of services, such as the permanent supportive housing approach, that help people who have been homeless for years get into housing and stay there. Research results support the effectiveness of this strategy and the willingness of people homeless for 15 or 20 years to enter this type of housing and to stay—an 80 to 85 percent retention rate over a two-year period. In fact, original estimates of the number of units needed to serve a particular population size have had to be expanded because turnover has been low.

Even for people perceived as needing transitional help, the move has been to put them in housing and to offer supportive services for as long as they need it, but to back off when they don't need the help anymore. This is called the "transition in place" approach since the households don't have to move even though services end. Transitional housing is very important for substance abusers because there's a threshold period of sobriety and cleanness—about two years—that if you can get beyond you're probably going to do OK on your own.

There's more willingness today among providers to deal with multiple problems simultaneously, especially those of people with mental illness who are substance abusers. It used to be that some homeless services would not treat mental illness until the person had gotten off the substances, and others would do the reverse. But many service providers have come to realize that picking the people that they know how to serve is not going to solve the problem. It's also becoming evident that the homeless system is doing pickup for a lot of other systems that have failed, such as mental health, corrections, foster care, and substance abuse treatment.

5. Could new or strengthened policies prevent homelessness?

The most effective strategy would be to improve public institutional supports for people who are leaving corrections, mental health, or substance abuse facilities. Substance abuse agencies have not done much, whereas mental health agencies—some of them—have been very deep into it, and corrections folks are coming around. Those leaving corrections and mental health facilities are the most likely to become homeless, and once they are, to stay that way for a long time. You could make a significant dent in that population if public institutions did much more to ease the transition back into society.

Corrections institutions are finally looking at their own bottom line and seeing that the high recidivism rate is costing them a lot of money. The single best thing they can do to save that money is to invest in housing and employment supports for six months or so after a person leaves corrections.

Mental health agencies are, in some ways, in the same boat—unstable people get hospitalized and keep coming back to the system and costing the system money. States like Massachusetts have developed housing and community supports that will keep people from returning to the hospital and, simultaneously, from becoming homeless.

Another whole range of programs called homelessness prevention usually serve families needing help with rent or utilities to prevent evictions. Most such programs screen for the simplest problems—problems that one-month worth of financial assistance will solve. There's no doubt that recipients are poor, and no question that they need the money, but there is no evidence that money paid to prevent utility shutoff or back rent is preventing homelessness.

Another policy area is related to poverty and what can be done to reduce the amount of totally desperate poverty in this country—improving educational systems, improving job opportunities, improving skills. Homelessness isn't as much of a risk for the working poor as for the extremely poor. The households under 50 percent of poverty are the most at risk and the most inadequately served by the public systems that should be doing better by them.