Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Objectives. We modeled rates of family and single-adult homelessness in the United States in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan regions and as a function of community-level demographic, behavioral, health, economic, and safety net characteristics.

Methods. We entered community-level characteristics and US Department of Housing and Urban Development point-in-time counts for a single night in January 2009 into separate mixed-effects statistical analyses that modeled homelessness rates for 4 subpopulations: families and single adults inmetropolitan and nonmetropolitan regions.

Results. Community-level factors accounted for 25% to 50% of the variance in homelessness rates across models. In metropolitan regions, alcohol consumption, social support, and several economic …

As this special issue of the journal well reflects, much progress has been made in homelessness research. That progress has been matched with advances in homelessness policy and programming, nearly all of it informed by the contributions of the research community. While the imperatives of policy-making have required decisions to be made with imperfect knowledge, a substantial enough convergence of theory and evidence has enabled policymakers to shift homelessness policy and practice in important ways. Those shifts have also prefigured some of policymakers’ needs from the research community in the future.