Homelessness in the United States

Homelessness is a stubborn and persistent phenomenon in the United States. According to 2022 data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, over a half million people experience homelessness on a given night in the United States. This single night count fails to capture the fact that over a lifetime, approximately 4 to 7 percent of the US population will experience homelessness at some point. These lifetime prevalence estimates underscore that homelessness is not a fringe issue affecting a small number of unfortunate individuals, but rather is a structural challenge that requires and demands a robust societal response. A comprehensive body of research describes the scope of the problem, the people who experience homelessness, its history, its causal drivers, the individual and societal costs of homelessness, and potential solutions to the problem. The scholarly literature also considers how broader structural changes are needed to address the systemic racism and inequality that contribute to the homelessness crisis. This bibliography includes research from scholars from a broad array of disciplines and fields, including anthropology, medicine, nursing, public health, social work, psychology, sociology, geography, economics, political science, public policy, urban planning, and real estate. The homeless population is not uniform, so understanding who experiences homelessness is essential because it tells a critical story about the nature of the crisis and its causes. Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and families are substantially overrepresented in the homeless population. This disproportionality speaks to the important role that racism and discrimination in a range of systems and institutions—such as housing, education, healthcare, and criminal justice—have played in shaping the scale and composition of this crisis. At its core, homelessness is the result of limited or restricted access to housing. As numerous studies demonstrate, housing ends homelessness. As it is for many phenomena in the social world, identifying the causal pathways into and explanations of homelessness is a complicated exercise. Individual attributes and behavior can produce a bout of homelessness, but so can the context in which people live.