The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) submits annual reports to Congress about homelessness in the United States. The reports include point-in-time counts of homeless persons on a single night in January based on local community counts. These counts are submitted annually to HUD by local Continuums of Care (CoC) as part of the competitive funding process. HUD updates CoC boundaries annually and re-calculates historical point-in-time counts with the new boundary. Due to this, PolicyMap has chosen to present data for all years at the most current boundary.
Because of pandemic-related disruptions to counts of unsheltered homeless people in January 2021, caution should be taken when using data on unsheltered homeless or comparing these values to other years. For more information see the AHAR Report here: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2021-AHAR-Part-1.pdf .