Millions of People Staying on a Couch, in a Spare Room, or Doubled Up with Family Aren’t Counted as Homeless at All
When most people picture homelessness, they picture what’s visible: someone on a street corner with a cardboard sign, an encampment swept off a sidewalk, a line stretching out the door of a soup kitchen. But there’s a form of homelessness that rarely shows up in state or federal data, because it rarely shows up where anyone can see it. It’s called “doubled-up” homelessness.
To understand what doubled-up homelessness actually looks like, Invisible People spoke with Molly Richard, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences, who has spent years studying the issue.
Richard starts by drawing a line between doubled-up homelessness and the much more common experience of simply sharing a home.
“While a lot of people choose to share housing, doubled-up homelessness zeroes in on those who are staying with others temporarily and who otherwise would be at risk of experiencing other forms of homelessness,” Richard said. “For example, it might be a parent and children staying in one bedroom at a relative’s house, an individual sleeping on a friend’s couch after an eviction, or someone who has been staying in a shelter or sleeping outside but is temporarily able to stay with family or friends.”
The important distinction here is choice. A grandmother moving in with her adult children isn’t doubled-up homelessness. Someone who lost their apartment and has nowhere else to go is.
“Multigenerational living or sharing housing can obviously be positive and is the norm for many. Here, we are talking about situations driven by housing loss or economic hardship,” Richard said.
Why Is Doubled-Up Homelessness Often Overlooked?
Part of the reason doubled-up homelessness stays hidden comes down to how homelessness itself gets counted.
“It is also a form of homelessness that is largely invisible in our most familiar statistics. HUD’s annual Point-in-Time count focuses on people in shelters or places not meant for human habitation, so someone sleeping on a relative’s floor because they lost their apartment generally does not appear in that count,” Richard told Invisible People.
That gap matters because the PIT count already struggles to capture the full scope of homelessness on its own. It happens just once a year, typically in late January, offering a single snapshot rather than an ongoing picture. Leaving doubled-up homelessness out of that count doesn’t just create a blind spot; it compounds the inaccuracies already built into the data. It’s a gap Richard’s research is trying to close.
“My team’s research uses Census American Community Survey data to estimate this population. Depending on the year and location, it’s typically 4 to 6 times the scale of HUD’s PIT count,” she said.
Doubling Up Can Lead to Other Forms of Homelessness
Doubled-up homelessness is typically characterized as an unstable living situation that can quickly lead to other forms of homelessness. Unlike a lease or formal housing arrangement, staying with family or friends offers no legal protections, so the situation can end abruptly and with little warning.
“People who doubled up often have no formal right to remain in the home and can be asked to leave with very little notice,” Richard said. “Families may move repeatedly between relatives or friends, eventually exhausting the people in their network who can take them in.”
Once that network runs out, a shelter, a car, or the street may be the only options left.
Personal safety is also a concern. When someone has few housing options, they may feel they have little choice but to remain in a home where there is conflict, abuse, exploitation, or other unsafe conditions.
Leaving isn’t always a simple decision when the alternative is having nowhere else to go. The arrangement can also destabilize the household doing the hosting.
“There can be substantial strain on the host household as well. Often these are families who are already struggling with housing costs themselves. Taking in additional people can increase expenses, create overcrowding, and sometimes put the host household’s own housing stability at risk (for example, if their lease prohibits guests),” Richard said.
Doubled-up living situations can also involve stress, instability, overcrowding, and even negative impacts on health and well-being. Children in particular can feel the effects through disrupted schooling, inconsistent routines, and the anxiety of not knowing how long a living situation will last. All of these combined factors can lead to other forms of homelessness.
People Who Are Doubled-Up Typically Are Not Eligible for Federally Funded Homelessness Assistance Programs
Even when a doubled-up living situation is clearly unstable, it doesn’t automatically open the door to help.
“Some people can qualify for assistance if they can show they are imminently about to lose the place they are staying, but this can be challenging, and often resources for these groups are limited,” Richard said.
Schools are often the one system that does reach these families, but even that support has limits. While the Department of Education McKinney-Vento program can provide help to school-aged children who are doubled-up, Richard points out that these services are primarily about educational stability. This program focuses on transportation and getting kids to school; it is not designed to help families secure housing.
This puts doubled-up households and families in a really difficult spot. “They have significant barriers to securing housing independently, but because they have found a temporary place to stay, they may not qualify for the programs specifically designed to help people experiencing homelessness,” Richard said.
Multiple Strategies Are Needed to Address Doubled-Up Homelessness
There’s no single fix for a problem that sits at the intersection of housing policy, education, and economic stability. Addressing doubled-up homelessness requires addressing homelessness overall. It needs to be part of a multi-agency coordinated effort to address homelessness itself, as well as insecurity and affordability.
According to Richard, recommended strategies include the following:
- Expanding definitions of homelessness to allow people living doubled up to qualify for city- or state-funded programs. Expanding eligibility can help households access support earlier, before experiencing the harmful health effects of living on the streets or in shelters.
- Offering rental assistance, flexible financial assistance, housing navigation, housing court and eviction mediation, legal services, and other forms of short-term support to help people create a stable situation or find new housing they can afford.
- Producing more housing, preserving existing affordable housing, and protecting renters from high rental increases, reducing the pressures that drive households to double up.
- Providing stronger employment opportunities, higher wages, and social safety net programs to help people maintain stable housing and reduce the likelihood of housing loss or doubling up.
“These strategies are complementary rather than competing approaches,” said Richard. “Long-term progress requires coordinated efforts across homelessness services, housing policy, and economic policy.”
