New York City's HomeBase program combats homelessness by helping shelter-seeking individuals and families find immediate alternatives, shorten their stay in shelter, and prevent repeated shelter stays. Winner of the 2009 HUD Secretary's Opportunity and Empowerment Award, the network of neighborhood-based homeless prevention centers offers a variety of prevention services. We'll take a closer look at HomeBase for features that may be applicable to other locations.

A new era in HUD's documentation of homelessness is marked by The 2008 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress — the first to provide year-to-year trend data. We'll review early trends in population counts, community responses in terms of services available, and the demographics of homeless populations, and see how the data is resourced and collected. We'll also examine first quarter 2009 information from the Homelessness Pulse Project that tracks real-time changes in homelessness.

HUD housing analysts have completed their study of changes in the nation's housing inventory from 2005 to 2007. The resulting Components of Inventory Change (CINCH) and the Rental Dynamics reports are available from the HUD USER Clearinghouse. We'll briefly review what the researchers found in terms of losses, gains, and characteristics of U.S. housing.