Between 2011 and 2020, the death rate among homeless people increased by 238%, according to an analysis of data from 22 localities in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The mortality rate in these localities increased from 814 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2011, to 2,752 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2020. The largest increases in cause-specific homeless mortality rates in the ten-year period were for deaths related to drug and alcohol overdose, diabetes, infection, cancer, homicide, and traffic injury.
These findings were reported in “Mortal Systemic Exclusion Yielded Steep Mortality-Rate Increases In People Experiencing Homelessness, 2011–20” by Matthew Z. Fowle and Giselle Routhier. The researchers built a national data set of individual-level death records for people experiencing homelessness, obtained from local medical examiners, coroners, sheriff’s offices, and departments of public health through a combination of public record and Freedom of Information Act requests. The data set contains 22,143 decedents presumed to be homeless in 22 localities during the period January 1, 2011, through December 31, 2020. The homeless population in these localities represented 28.7% of the estimated 580,466 people experiencing homelessness nationwide in 2020, and included seven of the 10 localities with the largest homeless populations. The goal was to discover data on mortality among people experiencing homelessness.
For more information, contact: Giselle Routhier, Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor, Department of Population Health, NYU Langone Health, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, New York 10016; Email: giselle.routhier@nyulangone.org; Website: https://med.nyu.edu/faculty/giselle-routhier