Helping America's Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing?

Homelessness has now been on the American policy agenda for close to two decades. In 1989, when Martha Burt wrote America's Homeless, (with Barbara Cohen, Urban Institute Press), policymakers and the public may have hoped that we could end the crisis relatively quickly. The arrival of the new millenium has not fulfilled that expectation. In this volume, Martha Burt and colleagues return to the issue with the most in-depth analysis of homelessness that has ever been published. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC), and extending their pioneering work, the authors examine every aspect of the issue, from how many homeless people there are, where they are, why they became homeless, and how long their homelessness lasts. They examine the programs that provide assistance to the homeless, and how they are configured within communities of different sizes. Finally, the authors explore what these data say about how policymakers have approached this problem, and about our prospects for effectively addressing it in the new millenium.