A Guide to Counting Unsheltered Homeless People

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Many communities have long understood the need to count, describe, and understand the homeless people who do not use shelters and are typically found on the streets, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not meant for human habitation. Unsheltered homeless people are an important subpopulation of homeless persons and their characteristics and needs must be accommodated within any strategy to reduce homelessness and help eliminate chronic homelessness. Collecting good baseline data about this subpopulation is essential to understanding the causes of homelessness and to designing effective responses, and can be used as a basis for comparison in future years.

This guide describes several methods for identifying, counting, and learning something about homeless people who are unlikely to be found in shelters or in other residential programs within a local homeless assistance network. Information about these approaches was gathered from communities throughout the country; examples of their methods are provided throughout the guide.