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The Cost Of Homelessness: A Perspective From The United States, Dennis P. Culhane

Dennis P. Culhane

This paper discusses how researchers and others have analyzed the services histories of persons who have experienced homelessness, as well as their imputed costs. This research has been used both to make visible the ways in which the clients of mainstream social welfare systems (health, corrections, income maintenance and child welfare) become homeless and, complementarily, the impact of people who experience homelessness on the use of these service systems. Most published work in this area has been based on the integration of administrative databases to identify cases and service utilization patterns; some have used retrospective interviews. Results have been used …