Adjective (of a person) who is homeless and therefore usually lives on the street. A public or private place that is not normally designed or used as a regular sleeping place for humans. Since its publication, HUD has also published Determining the Situation of Homeless Youth to help providers understand how young people meet the HUD definition of homelessness in each of the four categories, although that guidance is easily expanded to help providers assess the eligibility of other populations by definition. In the course of this debate, questions related to the prevalence of health and mental health problems inevitably arise, but they are examined in greater detail in chapter 3, Health Problems of the Homeless.
As will be seen in the next chapter, the long-established system that has traditionally addressed homelessness is now facing a series of seemingly overwhelming problems. It is important for SOAR providers to understand these differences when determining who meets the housing criteria to be a SOAR applicant and which cases can be expedited in the SSA by using the “homeless” flag. The percentage of older people among the homeless population is lower than that of the general population. For example, samples are generally small and may not be generalized to other locations, data are often collected from individual sites, samples are not systematically extracted, measures and definitions of homelessness are inconsistent, and the rural population is virtually unidentified.
The growing public awareness of homelessness is also related to changes in the geographical dispersion of homeless people, who are becoming more visible in neighborhoods and communities that would not have imagined their presence in the past. This document helps clarify that people who lack the resources and support networks to obtain permanent housing meet the HUD definition of homelessness. Preliminary data reported by the Travel Assistance Program and the Child Welfare League (198) indicate that out of 163 families with 331 children in eight cities, only 57 percent of homeless children attended school regularly. A significant number of reports have focused on homeless people with mental illness and on homeless people who suffer from alcohol abuse.
HUD recently published a new online training, Homeless Status Registration and Documentation, to help admissions workers better understand the categories of evidence required by HUD to document homelessness and the preferred order of priority for obtaining evidence. For the purposes of this report, the definition of a homeless or homeless person is the same as that of P. In these cases, the ESG or CoC program provider must understand and document these additional eligibility criteria, in addition to documenting a person's homeless status. Bassuk and colleagues (198), in their study of 80 homeless families living in family shelters in Massachusetts, also described fragmented support networks.
