The number of people experiencing homelessness in Wisconsin has remained stable compared to 2014, while dropping about 4 percent since 2010, according to numbers released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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HUD Secretary Julian Castro also noted in a conference call that the state of Virginia and more than a dozen cities including New Orleans; Houston; Las Vegas; Mobile, Alabama; and Troy, New York, have created programs to end homelessness among veterans in their communities.
HUD also reports that homelessness has fallen 13.3 percent in Rhode Island since 2010. In order to continue to improve data on youth, HUD revised its data collection requirements, which may result in future increased point-in-time counts as communities improve their methodologies.
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“We’re actually working very hard to be on the same page and to have strategies in place between all the federal partners that work on youth homelessness and housing instability”, Oliva said. Across the nation, communities are implementing systems to quickly and effectively house individuals and families experiencing homelessness in a coordinated way. “It includes families staying in homeless shelters, as well as families identified by volunteers who survey streets, parks, light rail stations and tunnels, all-night businesses, and other places frequented by homeless people”. Between 2007 and 2015, homelessness fell by 11 percent and chronic homelessness is down a whopping 31 percent. On a single night in January 2015, fewer than 48,000 veterans were homeless, and only 34 percent of those were on the street. That included a drop in veteran homelessness of 36 percent, a decrease in chronic homelessness of 22 percent and a 19 percent drop in the number of homeless families, HUD reports showed.
