Economic resources of the homeless: Evidence from Los Angeles

I. INTRODUCTION While issues related to homelessness have been prominent as far back as the turn of the century, the problem of homelessness has become increasingly obvious over the last 15 years, achieving a visibility and level of social concern unmatched since the Great Depression of the 1930s. More than anything else, this is related to the size of the homeless population. While efforts to enumerate such a mobile, hidden population are fraught with difficulty, best estimates currently suggest that at least 600,000 people in the United States experience what is usually referred to as "literal" homelessness over the course of a week - that is, are living in temporary shelters or on the streets - and that as many as 2 million different people may be homeless at some point over the course of a year (Burt and Cohen, 1989). More recent evidence suggests that as many as 13.5 million people in the United States have been homeless at some point in their lives and that 5.7 million were homeless between 1985 and 1990 (Link et al., 1994). While the causes of homelessness are extraordinarily complex (Koegel et al., 1996), homeless people almost unilaterally share some form of difficulty in accessing the economic resources needed to sustain housing. Even so, the sources of economic well-being on which the homeless draw are not well-understood. The objective of this paper is to investigate the economic resources of the homeless using unique data from Los Angeles. The study documents the various sources of support and the amount of assistance that is received from each. The paper then proceeds to concentrate on assistance received from one of the most important sources of income: the family. There has been growing interest among economists in understanding family support networks, or private transfers (see Schoeni, forthcoming, for a review), and our analyses of social support draw on some of the behavioral models that have been developed to address these issues. II. DATA The data analyzed were collected as part of the Course of Homelessness Study, which interviewed 1,548 individuals in two Los Angeles County sites - the urban downtown area, which has the largest and most dense concentration of homeless individuals in Los Angeles County, and the suburban West Side beach communities of Santa Monica and Venice, which contain the second highest concentration of homeless individuals in the county. These 1,548 adults were each interviewed face-to-face in 1990. (The sample is reduced to 1,402 due to missing values on some variables, with no single item missing for more than 37 persons.) A. Sampling Design For the purposes of this survey, people were considered to be homeless if, at some point in the last 30 days, they had spent at least one night in (i) a setting defined as temporary shelter, not designed for shelter, or in an impermanent arrangement for which they did not pay or (ii) a program for homeless individuals that defined stays as temporary. Women were over-sampled to comprise 30% of the sample though they were in fact approximately 16% of the homeless population across the downtown and West Side areas. To obtain a representative sample of homeless individuals in each of the two study sites, three nested sampling strata are defined - individuals who use shelter beds, individuals who do not use shelter beds but do use soup lines, and those who use neither - and allocated interviews to each in proportion to the number of homeless individuals who fall within them. Within the shelter bed and soup line strata, random samples of homeless individuals were drawn at each relevant facility in proportion to the number of eligible individuals the particular facility serves in a 30 day period. Individuals who do not use shelter beds or soup lines while they slept outside at night were randomly sampled, using a strategy modeled after Rossi et al. (1986). Implementing this sampling design involved using data obtained from three sources. …