Independent Research

Data analysis on housing and homelessness in the United States.

Gaither Research builds interactive dashboards and analysis from HUD's homelessness data. We use the Continuum of Care framework HUD reports on, so our numbers reconcile against the published federal totals.

How this research is different

We document data quality

Every CoC in our analyses carries a data-quality tier. Communities that count well can appear to have higher homelessness rates than communities that count poorly. We flag this explicitly so readers can tell real differences from measurement artifacts.

Reproducible from public sources

Our datasets are HUD's PIT counts, HUD's CoC funding awards, HUD's Housing Inventory Counts, and the UCSF BHHI CoC Data project. All are publicly available. Source files and processing scripts are tracked in git.

Rates expressed multiple ways

Rates can be shown per 10,000 residents, as a percentage, or as "1 in N." Counts can be sliced by sheltered, unsheltered, or total. Geographic decomposition shows whether a state's rate is driven by its major cities or distributed across the whole state.