Families

Extent of Family Homelessness

One way to estimate the extent of family homelessness is to determine the percentage of homeless people who are members of homeless families. The 2002 U.S. Conference of Mayors report on homelessness in twenty-five large cities concluded that 41 percent of those who were homeless on any given night were members of homeless families. But because the report relied largely on counting people in shelters and because families are more likely than single individuals to seek shelter, this proportion was probably an overestimate. The Urban Institute's National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC), which included a broader and more representative sample of clients of sixteen types of homeless assistance programs in seventy-six geographical areas, provides better data. It found that 34 percent of homeless service users in 1996 were members of homeless families: 23 percent were children and 11 percent were their parents. This survey also noted that families remained homeless for shorter periods and were less likely to have several episodes of homelessness than single adults. Because the turnover of families was more rapid than the turnover of single adults, it was therefore only logical that the proportion of families who were homeless over the course of the year would be larger than the proportion of people who were homeless on any given night. The sample did not include families or individuals who did not access services and were more likely to be chronically homeless.

Another way of measuring the extent of family homelessness is to determine the proportion of poor families who become homeless. Psychologist Dennis Culhane and his colleagues investigated this in [Page 150]Philadelphia and New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s by examining shelter records. They found that 10.5 percent of poor families and 13.6 percent of poor children had stayed in shelters during a three-year period in Philadelphia; in New York the percentages were 15.5 percent of poor families and 15.9 percent of poor children over five years. Sociologist Bruce Link and his colleagues, using data from a national telephone survey, found that 7.4 percent of adults in households with phones had been homeless (sleeping in places such as shelters, abandoned buildings, and bus and train stations) over their lifetimes. The comparable figure for those who had ever received public assistance was 19.8 percent. If the definition of homelessness was expanded to include doubling up, 31.2 percent of people who received public assistance had been homeless. Thus it is clear that homelessness is a common experience for poor families.

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