Last month, the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH)
held a press conference to announce the release of their report
entitled The State of Homelessness in America 2011, documenting
the depiction of homelessness in America between 2008 and 2009.
The report is available in summary format online with
interactive maps or as a pdf download. We frequently see one
image of homeless people depicted in the media, but the fact
that no map is coded with a single color reflects that
homelessness is not a uniform phenomenon. For instance, Vermont
saw a 27 percent increase in overall homelessness while
experiencing one of the lowest foreclosure rates. Michigan’s
overall homeless rate decreased by about 4 percent but it still
has the highest unemployment rate, 13.6 percent. It’s important
to keep in mind that what may show as a benign color on the map
may be far from favorable in reality. In South Dakota, which has
the lowest severe housing cost burden, almost 60 percent of
households below the poverty line are spen