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About This Site

Why does someone experience homelessness? Why does the rate of homelessness fluctuate from month to month or year to year? Using publicly available data and information about where people in Travis County lose their housing, we show that homelessness is a structural problem, one that can be prevented by addressing underlying socioeconomic conditions.

To show where the risk of becoming homeless is greatest, we have created a Homelessness Vulnerability Index that incorporates socioeconomic data at the Census Tract level.

The interactive map to the right and the buttons above allow you to dig into the data and see how homelessness is correlated with a number of socioeconomic conditions.

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Census Data:

The following data elements were calculated using the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey’s (ACS) 2019 5-year estimates:

• Rent Burden: Percent of renters who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
• Rent Increase: Percent increase in median gross rent from the 2010 5-year estimates to the 2019 5-year estimates.
• Overcrowded Rentals: Percent of rental units that have more than 1.5 occupants per room.
• Housing Value Increase: Percent increase in the median housing value from the 2010 5-year estimates to the 2019 5-year estimates.
• Gentrifying: A gentrifying tract is one that satisfies three conditions: (1) in 2010, it must have been at risk of gentrifying, meaning that a) it had an older housing stock than the county average, and b) the median income of its residents was less than the county median income; (2) the increase, between 2010 and 2019, in the percentage of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher is greater than the average increase across the county; and (3) either median housing values or median rent increased more, between 2010 and 2019, than they did across the county.
• Health Insurance: The percent of people, whether in the labor force or not, without health insurance.
• Poverty Rate: The percent of people living under the poverty line.
• Unemployment Rate: The percent of people in the labor force that are unemployed.

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Other Data Sources:

• Eviction Filing Rate: The filing rate is the number of evictions filed for every 100 renter-occupied homes in a Tract. The data presented here is the five-year average of that filing rate from 2012 to 2016 (accessed in August 2020). For more information on how eviction filings are counted, see the Eviction Lab.
• Homelessness Rate: The number of people falling into homelessness was calculated using a question on the Coordinated Assessment (the housing intake tool of the Austin/Travis County Homelessness Response System) that asks people what zip code in Austin they were last permanently housed in. Using population estimates, we then calculated that number, on a yearly basis, at the Tract level. The Homelessness Rate is that number per 5,000 people.
• Health Facilities: This number comes from the National Neighborhood Data Archive, which estimates neighborhood-level indicators using the Census Bureau and other data sources. The number presented here is the number of hospitals, health clinics, and doctor’s offices (from the National Establishment Time Series database) per 1,000 people in 2017, the latest year the data are available.

About the Vulnerability Index:

The Vulnerability Index Map on the landing page is our attempt at measuring and visualizing, at the neighborhood (i.e., Tract) level in Austin, how vulnerable people are to becoming homeless. We use the data we’ve outlined here and shown throughout the site to create that index. We do so by scaling all the variables and using a method called factor analysis, which allows us to estimate how much each variable is contributing to socioeconomic disadvantage, or, put differently, vulnerability to homelessness. Using each variable’s “score,” we construct a five-point scale. We excluded Tracts that approximately map onto UT-Austin’s campus, since many housing indicators (including rent burden and high rent costs) are likely more reflective of living on a college campus rather than being at risk of becoming homeless.