Dynamics of homelessness in urban America

Understand

The relationship between housing costs and homelessness has important implications for the way that city and county governments respond to increasing homeless populations.

• Though many analyses in the public policy literature have examined inter-community variation in homelessness rates to identify causal mechanisms of homelessness (Byrne et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2003; Fargo et al., 2013), few studies have examined time-varying homeless counts within the same community (McCandless et al., 2016).
• To examine trends in homeless population counts in the 25 largest U.S.
• metropolitan areas, we develop a dynamic Bayesian hierarchical model for time-varying homeless count data.