This paper summarizes the available measures and data sources for understanding housing insecurity in the United States, including measures of homelessness, housing cost burden, substandard housing, overcrowding and residential instability. It concludes that the housing field needs better measures of housing instability and would benefit from a standard set of measures, and possibly a standardized scale, that could be adapted for use in surveys across different domains. It then uses the creation of the US Department of Agriculture’s Core Food Security Module as a model to understand the possible benefits of a standard scale of housing insecurity and the process for creating one.