Housing Resources and Chronic Homelessness Across U.S. Communities, 2014-2024

Background: Homelessness assistance in the United States is organized through Continuums of Care (CoCs). It remains important to ask whether local housing resources are distributed in proportion to recorded homelessness.Methods: We constructed a 2014–2024 CoC panel to examine the geographic alignment of housing resources with population of people experiencing chronic homelessness (PECH) and measured the within-CoC association between prior-year permanent supportive housing (PSH) capacity and chronic homelessness. We compared the estimated PSH association with an illustrative benchmark assuming that additional beds housed people who would otherwise remain chronically homeless at the next count. The study measured associations and did not establish any causal effects.Results: Among 374 CoCs observed in both 2014 and 2024, PECH population increased by 69,046. Ten CoCs with the largest increases accounted for 66.3% of the net change. The dissimilarity index increased from 0.341 to 0.380 for PSH beds versus chronic homelessness, and from 0.290 in 2015 to 0.324 in 2024 for CoC awards versus total homelessness. In 2024, PSH beds and award dollars increased less than proportionally with measured need across CoCs, with elasticities of 0.715 and 0.760, respectively. Within CoCs, one additional PSH bed per 10,000 residents in the preceding year was associated with 0.0116 (95% CI, −0.0505 to 0.0738) more PECH per 10,000 residents. The confidence intervals from the primary model and eight comparable specifications excluded the illustrative benchmark of −0.454.Significance: Housing resources became less closely matched to the homeless population across different resource-need pairs. The findings point to two separate questions for housing policy: where resources are located and how local homelessness counts change as capacity expands.