Who Are the Suburban Homeless and What Do They Want? An Empirical Study of the Demand for Public Services

Abstract

Homelessness became a focus for planners and scholars over the past decade, but our understanding of the nature and extent of its associated problems remains unclear in many critical respects. We know homelessness affects a diverse population. We also know that, in addition to needing shelter, homeless persons draw on a variety of social services. For various reasons, however, the matching of services and shelter problems to individual characteristics is often ad hoc. This is a mounting concern as the pool of homeless persons diversifies even further. Based on a unique survey of the homeless population in Orange County, California, we employ a carefully constructed behavioral framework to link individual and structural circumstances to preferences for aid. We find that though the sample is diverse, financial problems dominate while medical problems, substance abuse, and financial needs are often unrelated. Further, these patterns do not generally vary by race and only rarely by gender. The results inform not only the targeting strategy of the community planning process, but also our broader understanding of poverty-related housing and public service demands outside the inner-city.