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Abstract
Some definitions of homelessness include doubling up—living with others because of economic hardship or housing loss. Doubling up can have negative consequences that should be addressed, but the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s methods for enumerating homelessness exclude these arrangements, and Department of Education counts of doubling up include only school children. We provide a new method for measuring doubled-up homelessness in the total population using American Community Survey public use microdata. Using this method, we find that 3.7 million people in the U.S. population were doubled up in 2019 and show significant differences in doubling up by geography, race and ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, school enrollment, and employment status, and compare these findings with research on sheltered and unsheltered homelessness. Notably, rates of Hispanic/Latinx doubled-up homelessness were high, in contrast to their rates of literal homelessness, and some rural areas with low rates of sheltered and unsheltered homelessness had high rates of doubling up. To aid in future research and policy, supplemental materials provide open-source tools for replicating the measure. Findings suggest that policies addressing homelessness and housing insecurity consider those experiencing doubled-up homelessness and that the current measure can assist in those efforts.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and the Social IMPACT Research Center of Heartland Alliance for work that inspired this study. We also thank anonymous members of the Chicago Public School family homelessness focus group; Jason Klingenstein; Thomas Brown; Amy Terpstra; the Homeless Planning Council in Nashville, Tennessee; Dr. Marybeth Shinn; Dr. Rachel McKane; and Jason Rodriguez for their important contributions to the study conceptualization and method. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program that funds the first author.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected. Please see Correction (10.1080/10511482.2023.2273629)
Notes
1. The current classification of severe physical problems for HUD’s worst case housing needs (WCHN) does not include overcrowding or households with subfamilies. Koebel and Renneckar (Citation2003) suggest that households that are doubled up may be a subgroup of households with WCHN, so including them would have a negligible impact on the measure. Our study, then, aims to zero in on this subgroup of households and specifically examine the so-called guests rather than the overall household.
2. AHS (used by HUD to describe WCHN, poor physical conditions, and overcrowding) releases data for 25 metropolitan areas, nine states, and the nation. CPS releases data for the nation, regions, and selected characteristics of states (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016).
3. Not all CoCs are coterminous with county or census tract boundaries, so constructing CoC-level population measures is difficult. A rigorous approach has been developed by Byrne and colleagues (Citation2013), and Byrne (Citation2018) has made population totals constructed from ACS 2016 5-year publicly available data. Because of the relatively stable nature of these population estimates and because we only use the data for broad mapping of homelessness rates, we determined these population totals to be current enough for our purposes.
4. In early stages, members of the Data Committee of the Nashville-Davidson Continuum of Care Homeless Planning Council, including shelter, service, and school-based professionals in the homeless service field, contributed to the development of the inclusion criteria. Following this process, the authors developed a measure and incorporated prior research to inform decision-making. Finally, a group of 10 parents of Chicago Public Schools students experiencing homelessness reviewed and approved the inclusion criteria for the measure and reviewed the current article, providing feedback that was incorporated into the final article. Additional contributions by individuals are described in the Acknowledgments.
5. A cutoff of 125% poverty was chosen to follow the National Alliance to End Homelessness State of Homelessness report’s definition of poor people living doubled up. This cutoff is the maximum for eligibility for Community Services Block Grant programs and is slightly more conservative than the cutoff for free school meals (130%) and Medicaid (138%).
6. To determine who respondents provide information for, the household head is asked, “How many people are living or staying at this address?” and are told to include “everyone who is living or staying here for more than 2 months” and “anyone else staying here who does not have another place to stay, even if they are here for 2 months or less.” Respondents are told to exclude “anyone who is living somewhere else for more than 2 months, such as a college student living away or someone in the Armed Forces on deployment” (U.S. Department of Commerce, Citation2018).
7. Housing status groups determine what share of the poverty threshold is adjusted based on housing costs. For units that have owners with mortgages, owners without mortgages, and renters, the shares of expenses for housing in the thresholds are 0.504, 0.402, and 0.514, respectively (Bureau of Labor Statistics Citation2013).
8. More than half the people who enter shelter indicate their prior living situation was staying with friends or family (as opposed to one in six who leave a place they owned or rented; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Citation2018). Availability and affordability of housing, among other factors, are associated with literal homelessness (see Rukmana, Citation2020, for a review), doubled-up homelessness among public school students (Evangelist & Shaefer, Citation2020), and household sharing (Mutchler & Krivo, Citation1989).
9. Miller and Bourgeois (Citation2013) report that the 19% of districts receiving McKinney–Vento funds in school year 2009–2010 identified 80% of the homeless students in the United States, and that that the disproportionality was not explained by population size (ratios of homeless to nonhomeless students were significantly higher in funded districts). Our calculations for 2018–2019 find that the 30% of districts receiving funds identified 64% of doubled-up students. Using a qualitative case study, Hallett and colleagues (Citation2015) describe how newly granted state funding motivated a district to begin counting doubled-up students.
10. For example, data issues reported for Tennessee for the 2016–2017 school year (the data used to determine the correlation between DoE and ACS measures for this article) were as follows: “Primary nighttime residence was not collected for all students. Increased outreach and identification activities [led] to an increase in the number of students identified as homeless. Regular assessments resumed, resulting in a significant increase in the number of homeless students assessed” (U.S. Department of Education, Citation2018, p. 18).
11. Morton and colleagues (Citation2018) estimated doubled-up homelessness by including youths who were “couch surfing,” or “moving from one temporary living arrangement to another without a secure place to be” (p. 15).
12. Analysis of the 2009 AHS data by household size and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) status (central city, urban suburbs, rural suburbs, and nonmetropolitan) finds that the median square footage of owner-occupied housing units in urban metropolitan areas is 1,800. In rural metropolitan suburbs, the median is 1,900 sq. ft, and in nonmetropolitan areas, which include rural towns and areas disconnected from MSAs (measured by commuting patterns and population density) it is 1,680 sq. ft. This suggests that rural areas near cities have larger average homes, but that the most rural areas, where income is lower than in the rural suburbs, do not. Additionally, the median square footage per person was 800 for all areas except the central cities of MSAs, where the median was 767 (Dietz & Siniavskaia, Citation2011).
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Notes on contributors
Molly K. Richard
Molly K. Richard is a PhD student in community research and action at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Human and Organizational Development. Her research interests include the structural causes of homelessness, its racial disparities, and frameworks for equitable homelessness prevention and response.
Julie Dworkin
Julie Dworkin is Director of Policy for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Her advocacy work focuses on increasing resources for affordable housing, youth homelessness, and criminal justice reform.
Katherine Grace Rule
Katherine Grace Rule is a graduate student in the Community Development and Action program at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Human and Organizational Development.
Suniya Farooqui
Suniya Farooqui is a senior data analyst with the Social IMPACT Research Center at Heartland Alliance. Her work focuses on economic security/housing, workforce development, and program evaluation.
Zachary Glendening
Zachary Glendening is a PhD candidate in community research and action at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Human and Organizational Development. His research focuses on housing, homelessness, and disabilities.
Sam Carlson
Sam Carlson is the manager of research and outreach at Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. He specializes in Chicago housing law, policy, and advocacy impacting people experiencing homelessness and housing instability.