Homelessness in the United States by Joel Blau. Oxford University Press 1992. A homeless life, like all lives, is irreducibly anecdotal. But anecdotes make poor history and no science. The social sciences are derived of social facts, and social facts belong to a realm in which people can have 2.3 children.
Social facts are, in a word, statistical.
That being said, Joel Blau has produced a map of homelessness that coincides well with the ground so far as I have walked it. I became homeless in early 1988. Surely these will be among the new entries in the next edition. Although I traveled after one prospect or another, almost all of the time I was actually on the streets was spent in the city where I became homeless. This is the way of homelessness in the Eighties.