Homelessness has now been on the American policy agenda for close to two decades. In 1989, when the Urban Institute published America's Homeless, (Burt and Cohen 1989), policymakers and the public may have expected, or hoped, that homelessness could be ended relatively quickly. The 1990s did not fulfill this expectation. Programs and services to help homeless people expanded dramatically, but visible homelessness in many American communities did not diminish. Based on the newest and most comprehensive homelessness data, Helping America's Homeless explores the persistence of homelessness at the end of a decade of unprecedented prosperity, and suggests strategies that could prevent homelessness at the dawn of the new millennium.

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