Research Publications
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Using data from October 1, 2022 through September 30, 2023 these documents compile totals of people experiencing homelessness or seeking services through HMIS affiliated providers or DVIMS providers coming from each of the 100 house districts in Iowa.
Using data from October 1, 2022 through September 30, 2023 these documents compile totals of people experiencing homelessness or seeking services through HMIS affiliated providers or DVIMS providers coming from each of the 50 Senate districts in Iowa.
The racialization of poverty is an uncontested truth. In whatever way society is stratified economically, the concentration of minority populations increases as the level of poverty increases. Homelessness may be understood as the extreme manifestation of poverty, so much so that whatever other factors there may be, they are all covariant with poverty. And so, we expect to see racial inequity in populations experiencing homelessness passed on to us from social forces of racism broadly present in the economy. Our challenge is to determine how race and inequality manifest in the experience of homelessness and the execution of the system designed to prevent and respond to homelessness.
This analysis takes a deep dive into the specifics of the attribution of the status of ‘chronically homeless’ to people who otherwise exhibit patterns of chronicity in their housing instability, including a detailed analysis of the triage tool and disability diagnosis in Polk county and how those things relate to race and ethnicity considering the impacts of requiring a medical professional determine whether a person does or does not have a disability.
Illicit substance use among populations experiencing homelessness in Polk County, Iowa favors methamphetamine use. This contrasts with recent national conversations about expansion of prevalence of opiate use among populations experiencing homelessness but is more consistent with SAMHSA data on drug use regionally.
While the population in the United States is aging overall, the population experiencing homelessness is aging at a significantly higher rate than the population as a whole. The impact is most clearly demonstrated among those clients in permanent supportive housing.
This investigation examines the conditions of housing instability in Council Bluffs and need for additional permanent housing, both in isolation and relative to provision within the continuum of care between Omaha and Council Bluffs.
The persistent nature of homelessness and poverty is a social fact and point of confusion for many observers. A remarkably constant and predictable number of people are homeless at any given time. Why is it, how is it, that in such a wealthy economy full of opportunity so many people find themselves homeless?
Organized by HUD’s continua of care (COC), Institute for Community Alliances (ICA) operates HMIS systems in Iowa. Those Iowa COC are Polk County, Woodbury County, Pottawattamie County reports as part of the Omaha Nebraska COC, but in this report Pottawattamie providers are included in some tables, then across the state the remaining 96 counties comprise the Balance of State continuum of care. […]
This is the Annual Report for 2023, using data from the 2022 calendar year.
This years annual report incorporates the ‘county level data book’ from 2022 for a longer report that has extensive profiles of populations entering service use from the county in Iowa which was identified as the county where that person or household was last stably housed. The report also presents statewide data and analysis of trends in service provision this year, with the introduction of the iowahousinghelp.com portal and expanded provision of coordinated entry. This years report also includes extensive data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 5-year estimate for 2021, which make meaningful comparisons to service use for each county, specifying housing availability and economic profiles of each county.