Friends of the Unsheltered Friends of the UnshelteredResearch Websites
The following websites contain a treasure trove of information!
Cities That Have Solved Homelessness by CAUF Society. There is a link to a TED talk on their website. See https://caufsociety.com/cities-solving-homelessness/.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness is a nonpartisan organization committed to preventing and ending homelessness in the United States. There website at https://endhomelessness.org/ contains a wealth of information! A good window into their work is the article, Creating Systems That Work.
National Alliance to End Homelessness
National Alliance to End Homelessness
This is a great resource! From their website, their Mission Statement includes:
The National Alliance to End Homelessness is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose sole purpose is to end homelessness in the United States. We use research and data to find solutions to homelessness; we work with federal and local partners to create a solid base of policy and resources that support those solutions; and then we help communities implement them.
Visit the website here.
Portland State University's Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative
Portland State University’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative
The Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative brings together expertise and skills from across Portland State University and the country to collaborate with people experiencing homelessness, advocates, service providers, leaders, and other stakeholders.
Our goal is to reduce homelessness and its negative impact on individuals, families and communities with an emphasis on communities of color through solutions-oriented research
and evidence-based science. You can learn more about our research, evaluation, and impact in our annual report for fiscal year 2020.
Visit the website here.
Oregon Housing and Community Solutions: Homelessness Prevention
Oregon Housing and Community Solutions: Homelessness Prevention
From their website, the Mission Statement includes:
“We provide stable and affordable housing and engage leaders, to develop an integrated statewide policy that addresses poverty and provides opportunity for Oregonians.”
And in the “What We Do:”
“Oregon Housing and Community Services is Oregon’s housing finance agency, providing financial and program support to create and preserve opportunities for quality, affordable housing for Oregonians of lower and moderate income.”
Visit the website here.
Homeless Hub - a Canadian research institute that is a fantastic source of information on homelessness
The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH) is a non-partisan research and policy partnership between academics, policy and decision makers, service providers and people with lived experience of homelessness. We work in collaboration with partners to conduct and mobilize research designed to have an impact on solutions to homelessness. Housed at York University, the COH evolved out of a 2008 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funded project called the Canadian Homelessness Research Network. Led by Dr. Stephen Gaetz, CEO & President, the COH collaborates with partners to conduct and mobilize research that contributes to better, more effective solutions to homelessness.
My suggestion is to start here at Homelessness 101: https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/homelessness-101.
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
From their website, the About Us includes:
The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) is the only federal agency with a sole mission focused on preventing and ending homelessness in America.
The council consists of 19 federal agencies that help create and catalyze implementation of the Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.
USICH works across federal, state, and local governments, as well as the private sector, to help communities create partnerships, use resources in the most efficient and effective ways, and employ evidence-based best practices.
Visit the website here.
Last Updated on April 22, 2024
Oregon Point in Time Count (PIT)
This page is focused on Oregon with an emphasis on Clatsop County. Two documents shown below depict the situation in all Oregon counties. If you are interested in Federal reports they can be found at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar.html.
“The Point-in-Time (PIT) count is a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness that HUD requires each Continuum of Care (CoC) nationwide to conduct in the last 10 days of January each year.” More information on the PIT can be found at https://www.hudexchange.info/trainings/courses/point-in-time-pit-count-standards-and-methodologies-training/. Federal reports, including counts by state and region, can be found at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar.html.
Oregon has one of the highest rates of homelessness of all states. See https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/. Oregon’s new governor has declared a state of emergency due to homelessness (see https://www.oregon.gov/gov/eo/eo-23-02.pdf).
The Oregon Housing & Community Services website contains the repository for Oregon’s latest counts. See https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/homelessness/Pages/index.aspx. As of April 22, 2024 they are still reporting “ancient” data… 2019. However, at some point they (1) migrated to Tableau as the data presentation tool and (2) stopped posting the underlying data in spreadsheet format. From my perspective the Tableau presentations they provide make it very difficult for me to fully understand the unsheltered situation in Clatsop County and/or the state itself. It doesn’t stand out from the presentation but Clatsop County continues to have the highest per capita rate of homelessness in the state. The following are recent PIT counts for Clatsop County by year:
- 2017: 680
- 2018: 790
- 2019: 894
- 2020: 724
- 2021: 928
More current data is available at Portland State University’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. See https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/news/portland-state-releases-2023-oregon-statewide-homelessness-report. The 2023 report is at https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=hrac_pub.
2021 Oregon Homelessness PIT Estimates
Unsheltered Point in Time data for 2021 is particularly problematic. “First, two CoCs [Continuum of Cares] received a waiver for the unsheltered count from HUD in 2021. These included the Rural Oregon CoC, which contains the most counties of any CoC by far (26 of 36), and Portland/Multnomah, the CoC with the largest urban area in the state. Second, the requirement that CoCs conduct an unsheltered count only every other year means that some CoCs simply repeat the prior year’s count to HUD in the off year. Some CoCs (or counties within CoCs) do conduct actual unsheltered counts in off years, but the practice varies considerably even within the state. As a result, the last year for which we are certain that we have a full county-level unsheltered PIT count is 2019.”
Download the chart in pdf form here.
Portland State Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative (2022). Oregon Statewide Homelessness Estimates 2021. Retrieved from https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/statewide-homelessness-estimate-2021
A table showing the rates of homelessness within Oregon (by county) from 2010 to 2021 (the latest year) is available here. Comparing data between both years and between counties is difficult due to procedures changing over time and differing implementation strategies.
Older information is available below….
During the May 13, 2021 Seaside Forum on Homelessness, Viviana Matthews, Executive Director of Clatsop Community Action (CCA), reported there were over one thousand homeless in the county for the 2020 PIT count. CCA is responsible for the count in this area. See https://youtu.be/8zerK2nMXpo?t=1396.
As of March 19, 2023 Oregon Housing & Community Services is still reporting the 2019 count as the latest. However, 2021 estimates can be found at Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative at https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/statewide-homelessness-estimate-2021.
Get the document here.
Via personal email from Megan Boltan, OHCS Research Analyst, I did obtain the 2018 spreadsheet format PIT data. It can be retrieved at 2018-point-in-time-homeless-count PIT – All Summaries by County 2018_External. I did add two sheets to graph the counties based on per capita rates. I’ve never been able to obtain the 2017 & 2019 spreadsheet data.
While the information is somewhat dated, I find the 2017 Homeless by County – Oregon Public Health Division report to still be informative. It compares rates of homelessness across Oregon’s counties. There is the valid argument that the rate of homelessness is higher in rural counties, however, Clatsop far eclipses other rural Oregon counties.
A table showing the rates of homelessness within Oregon (by county) from 2010 to 2019 (the latest year) is available here.
Spreadsheet PIT data from 2009 to 2015 can be found at the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. The following is a snapshot from January 10, 2019 (opens in new browser tab/window and will be slow as it accesses the archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20190110192830/http://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/Pages/research-point-in-time-homeless-count-in-oregon.aspx. The spreadsheets for 2012 to 2014 do not break the data down by county.
The PIT data contains counts of the unsheltered, not rates (i.e. per capita). The best source of Oregon’s population (aggregate and by county) is from Portland State University’s Population Research Center at https://www.pdx.edu/population-research/. Combining the PIT and the population data can provide per capita rates.