Homelessness is a topic that has been on my mind a lot over the past few years and I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while. It is a very broad topic with lots of data, but very little understanding. A 5-minute blog post will not cover the subject, so I am planning on doing a series of posts on the topic.

I volunteer helping two different homeless populations in Seattle (a weekly Sunday morning breakfast held downtown, and a county sanctioned homeless camp in the Shoreline area) and I have a lot of thoughts based on my anecdotal observations, but I am far from an expert. The problem is complex, and just as there is not a single cause of homelessness, I also do not see a magic bullet that will solve the problem. For example, it would be nice to give everybody a house, but even this would not solve the problem for everybody.

While I have my own observations, this series of posts will also rely heavily on:

• Studies, statistics, and articles published by people better educated than myself.
• Conversations with my homeless friends.
• Anecdotal experiences of people who have overcome homelessness.

I want to begin by making some clarifications:

• Everybody reports statistics differently, so almost nobody’s numbers align perfectly. The statistics I show are meant to be more “directional” than absolute.
• While I am mostly writing about Seattle, some of my statistics come from nationwide studies rather than Seattle based studies.
• Homeless statistics usually include those living in shelters as well as the unsheltered.

Finally, I will end with this with a bunch of random graphs with no context: