Federal, state, and local agencies use different definitions of homelessness, which affects eligibility and services available to individuals and families. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) definition of homeless is most consequential, given that it defines who is eligible for federally-funded homeless assistance programs.
The HUD definition includes four categories of homelessness: literally homeless, imminent risk of homelessness, homeless under other federal statutes, or fleeing/attempting to flee domestic violence. You can find more information about HUD’s definition of homelessness here.
Housing insecure estimates were created using the California Department of Education’s student homelessness counts. In California, there were 246,480 total homeless students, and we used a multiplier of 5.53 to estimate the total housing insecure counts.
See methods to learn more about how we calculate housing insecurity.
Individuals were identified as doubled up using the 5-year 2019 American Community Survey (ACS). While the ACS does not identify doubled up counts, we use the definition provided by researchers in this 2021 report, which identified an individual as doubled up if they were “poor or near poor” and lived in a household where they did not share household costs and were not customarily under the responsibility of the head of household.
See methods to learn more about how we calculated doubled up estimates.
The Point-in-Time (PIT) count estimates the total number of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness. These estimates are mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a requirement for federal funding. California’s PIT counts are provided by the state’s 44 Continuum of Care (CoC) partners and are typically conducted annually in January. Due to Covid-19, many CoCs delayed their counts in 2022. You can learn more about HUD’s PIT counts here.
The California counts were obtained from here. Counts reflect estimates from the 2023 Point in Time, the most up-to-date data available that includes both sheltered and unsheltered estimates.