We’ve been focusing a lot on homelessness in urban areas such as New York City and various parts of L.A. County, so I wanted to look more at rural areas and see how homelessness is affecting people. What I did found is that many who find themselves homeless in a rural area often try their best to make it to an urban setting with the idea that more people equals more job opportunities and more places to sleep. I stumbled across this interactive map that ranks each state’s homelessness per 100 thousand residents for the last five to six years, and I was surprised to see first off that Hawaii ranks number one in the country for most homeless people per 100 thousand residents. I could have guessed that California and New York have very large homeless populations, but I had no idea how prevalent homelessness is in between the two coasts. Places like Montana, Minnesota, and North Dakota have much more homelessness than I would have first anticipated (North Dakota went from 46th in 2012 to 6th in 2013), and Mississippi really threw me off when I saw it’s ranked 50th in the country with only 94 homeless people per 100 thousand residents; I guess those are my uneducated biases coming in to play.

Another thing I saw that I think is worth noting is that there are only four states on the map that have more unsheltered homeless than sheltered homeless. I get a couple different feelings from this data, the first being that maybe we are doing a decently good job dealing with homelessness and the lack of affordable housing if there is a vastly greater sheltered homeless population than unsheltered homeless population. Secondly, how many of those people (sheltered and unsheltered) are getting any other aid they need to survive. And lastly if there is potential for the unsheltered to get in to shelters, and the sheltered to get jobs and affordable housing, or are people just doubling up and moving around? From what I saw on the maps from years past the numbers in California have stayed pretty consistent; maybe this just looks like good news and we actually haven’t done that much to improve the situations of homeless people.

http://www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/homelessness-in-america-maps/