01/07/2010, John Rudoy: Interestingly, the previous trend in which the number of homeless families increased steadily while the number of single homeless decreased has reversed over the last month or so. Maybe this signals a change in the long term trend over the last five years, but it may also just reflect the cyclical nature of these counts-- on average over the last five years the number of homeless families has peaked in late fall while the number of single homeless has peaked in mid winter (see my graph Cyclical Changes in Homeless Rates NYC for an illustration of this).

11/19/2009, John Rudoy: The Pattern has changed a bit since the last update. The number of homeless families in NYC continues to rise, but the single homeless count has also been increasing quite a bit lately. There are still far more homeless families than single homeless individuals, but since September the amounts of both have increased by about 3.5%. It will be interesting to watch this as the economy improves (or does not) over the next several months.

10/13/2009, John Rudoy: After about a month of tracking this, I think it is interesting to note that this shows a similar pattern as the monthly NYC homeless counts going back several years (posted as another graph here on Data360): single homeless counts have remained essentially flat, while homeless family counts have crept up over time.

09/30/2009, John Rudoy: The NYC Dept of Homeless Services does a census about once a day. I will update this continually to follow how changes in both homeless family and single homeless counts vary with economic conditions.