data - Greensboro Housing Coalition

Executive Summary
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is pleased to present the
2008 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR), the fourth in a series of reports on
homelessness in the United States. The reports respond to a series of Congressional
directives calling for the collection and analysis of data on homelessness. The 2008 AHAR
breaks new ground by being the first report to provide year-to-year trend information on
homelessness in the United States. The report provides the latest counts of homelessness
nationwide—including counts of individuals, persons in families, and special population
groups such as veterans and chronically homeless people. The report also covers the types of
locations where people use emergency shelter and transitional housing; where people were
just before they entered a residential program; how much time they spend in shelters over the
course of a year; and the size and use of the U.S inventory of residential programs for
homeless people. This AHAR also is the first to compare Point-in-Time estimates reported
by Continuums of Care across several years.
Data Sources Used in the AHAR
The AHAR is based on two data sources:
1. Continuum of Care applications are submitted to HUD annually as part of the
competitive funding process and provide one-night, Point-in-Time (PIT) counts of both
sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations. The PIT counts are based on the
number of homeless persons on a single night during the last week in January, and the
most recent PIT counts for which data are available nationally were conducted in
January 2008.
2. Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) are electronic administrative
databases that are designed to record and store client-level information on the
characteristics and service needs of homeless persons. HMIS data is used to produce
counts of the sheltered homeless population over a full year—that is, people who used
emergency shelter or transitional housing programs at some time during the course of a
year. The 2008 AHAR uses HMIS data for the most recent, one-year reporting period
and compares these data to previous HMIS-based findings.
Point-in-Time Estimates of Homeless Persons in 2008
On a single night in January 2008, there were 664,414 sheltered and unsheltered homeless
persons nationwide. Nearly 6 in 10 people who were homeless at a single point-in-time were
in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, while 42 percent were unsheltered on
the “street” or in other places not meant for human habitation.
Executive Summary
i