There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a book on housing insecurity and homelessness, follows five families in Atlanta as they struggle to remain housed. The stories center on a sliver of the population who are struggling with housing despite full time employment.
The author of There is No Place for Us asserts that part of the housing insecurity problem is the way homelessness is defined and counted. Those who live in cars, in hotels or motels, or doubled-up with another family are not considered homeless in the federal Housing and Urban Development official counts.
In Minnesota, Wilder Research conducts a single-night count of homelessness across the entire state every three years and their data does include those who are not in a formal shelter. The most recent report is a count from 2023, which concluded that 10,522 people experienced homelessness in Minnesota in a single night. One-third of those experiencing homelessness in Minnesota are not in a formal shelter.
A new report by Wilder, focuses on an aspect of that same 2023 count: Homelessness Among Adults 55+ in Minnesota. More older adults in Minnesota are now experiencing homelessness than ever before; there were 1,204 adults in this category counted in their single-night count.
Minnesota has many programs for people who are experiencing homelessness, including seven state-funded, Department of Human Services (DHS)-administered programs. For a list of the seven programs, see Minnesota House Research Department’s publication: Programs and Services for People Experiencing Homelessness.
One of the DHS-administered programs is the Homeless Youth Act, which was established at DHS in 2006. Their 2025 mandated report discusses the estimated 13,300 youth who experience homelessness over the course of a year and the programs available to this population of Minnesotans.