Homelessness in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Seasonality, Geography and Tone of Global Coverage, and How It Compares with Research

We measure how homelessness was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 127,861 de-duplicated homelessness articles, and set that coverage beside 22,357 research papers on homelessness. All results are measures of coverage, not of the number of people who are homeless. Six results stand out: Falling attention. Homelessness took a 36.5% smaller share of news in 2025 than in 2019: 6.99 against 11.01 articles per 10,000 news articles. Peaks and seasons. The largest monthly share was December 2019, at 17.27 per 10,000. April 2020 was second, at 15.35. On average 19.58% of each year's coverage appears in December and January. Geography. The United States holds 67.5% of located homelessness news, 1.39 times its share of all news. Ireland (2.43), New Zealand (2.12) and Canada (1.68) are the most over-represented countries, and India (0.21) is strongly under-represented. Within the United States, Oregon (4.63), California (2.9) and Arizona (2.62) lead; within India, Uttarakhand (2.1), Delhi (1.77) and Tamil Nadu (1.13). Tone and urgency. 65.3% of homelessness articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 78.2% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). What the stories are about. Emergency shelter programmes appear in 18.18% of themed articles and prevention programmes in 29.79%. Eviction prevention and veteran housing are small but highly specific themes. Research. Homelessness papers rose from 1.62 to 2.19 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2021, then fell back to 1.73 in 2025. The most-cited papers concern health.