January 7, 2025
UW News highlights Initiative-funded research offering better data on unhoused populations
UW News spoke with researchers Zack Almquist, a University of Washington associate professor of Sociology, and Amy Hagopian, professor emeritus of Health Systems and Population Health, to learn more about their Population Health Initiative research aimed at providing a more representative sample of the estimated total unhoused population.
America’s homeless service systems rely on federal reports to allocate funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Development (HUD) and direct local service providers towards appropriate outreach efforts. Hagopian emphasized that these counts are highly inaccurate and do not provide an accurate representation of the total number of unhoused individuals.
Hagopian, Almquist and their team of UW researchers developed a method that taps into people’s social networks to generate a more representative sample used to estimate the total unhoused population. Almquist described how modern sampling methods can provide more accurate insight into the estimated number of homeless individuals at any given time.
The researchers launched this method in partnership with King County in 2022 and repeated the process in 2024, publishing their findings Sept. 4 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.