Homelessness prevention programs intervene with households apparently in imminent danger of becoming homeless, and try to keep them housed. If they are at least partially successful, how do they change the average shelter spell of households actually becoming homeless? We use data from 2003 to...

Homelessness is part of the lives of many people. But almost no one is homeless for all or most of his or her life. The median shelter homeless spell is well under a month, and even “chronic homelessness” officially entails spells of a year or so. I model homelessness as part of people’s...