Why do some communities have ten times the homelessness of others?
It turns out you can largely see it in their housing markets. The Index turns that into one number — a 0–100 read on how much pressure a county's housing market puts on lower-income households, for nearly every county in the country.
One score. Three dimensions. Five stressors
Every county gets a Housing Distress Score from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the more pressure the housing market puts on lower-income households. The score comes from five stressors, grouped into three dimensions that count equally:
Availability. How hard it is to find a place to rent, measured by the rental vacancy rate.
Affordability. How far incomes stretch, measured by rent to income and price to income. The dimension is the average of the two.
Cost Burden. How many households pay too much for housing, measured by the share paying more than 30% of income and the share paying more than 50%. The dimension takes the higher of the two.
Discover the Housing Distress Index: see not just how much distress your county has, but what’s driving it.”
One comparable score, for nearly every U.S. county.
The Index is built from the housing measures that best track where homelessness concentrates — how high rents sit relative to income, how widely households cross the affordability line, and how tight rental supply is. It reads structural pressure, not a single-night count.
0-100
A single, comparable score
Low means lower pressure on lower-income households; high means more. The same scale everywhere.
~3,100
Counties, nationwide
The same finding, carried down from the metro scale to nearly every county in the country.
5
Signals, three dimensions
Availability, affordability, and cost burden — the three dimensions behind every score
Compare your county with places like it.
Because every county is scored the same way, you can set any county next to others. Rank it within its state, or find its sister counties: places that match it on what you choose, from population, density and land area to area median income, homelessness rate and count, or how rural or urban it is. You can also keep the matches within the same state, or to metro counties only.
Counties that look alike on paper often face very different pressure. Two places with the same population can sit at opposite ends of the scale. That’s what turns a local reading into a national conversation, and lets a planner in one state learn from another.
The housing gap isn’t spread evenly. It lands on the households with the least.
The Renter Housing Gap sits alongside the Index rather than inside it. It compares renter households with the homes priced for their income, band by band. Then it shows where they actually rent: higher-income households often rent down, and the lowest-income households are left paying more than they can afford, or without a home at all.
A number you can check, reproduce, and take to the table.
Verifiable evidence
Every figure is paired with the public source data it came from, locked to a fixed baseline.
Reproducible end to end
The whole pipeline, from raw data to score, can be rerun and audited by anyone.
No policy preference
Equally useful to developers, nonprofits, community land trusts, planners, and treatment advocates.
Research
The research behind the index
A deep dive into the construction, validation, and findings that drove the design — from raw inputs to final score.