Gaither Research Housing & Homelessness Data

About

Independent research on the systems that shape American homelessness.

Gaither Research publishes data analysis built on HUD's Continuum of Care framework. The goal is to make publicly available data legible to policymakers, journalists, and practitioners, and to flag where the data quietly fails them.

Director

Gaither Stephens

Director, Gaither Research

Gaither Stephens works on housing data and public information. He is also CEO of Gaither Dynamic, a consulting practice that has delivered over 300 dashboards to more than 60 organizations in government, healthcare, and homeless services, and the founder of CoC Alliance, an initiative supporting Continuum of Care collaboration.

Gaither Research operates as an independent research initiative, separate from any consulting client relationship, so its findings and methodology can stand on their own.

Reach out: [email protected] · [email protected]

What we publish

  • Interactive dashboards. Self-contained HTML pages that work in any browser. No login required. No tracking beyond Cloudflare's basic analytics.
  • Methodology notes. The data sources, transformations, and decisions behind every analysis are documented at /methodology.
  • Data quality audits. When the underlying data has known weaknesses (PIT count undercount, inconsistent CoC participation, etc.), we surface those weaknesses rather than smooth them over.
  • Reproducible source code. The site, the data processing, and the dashboards are all in a public repository at github.com/GaitherStephens/gaither-research.

What we don't do

  • Advocacy. We don't argue for specific policies. We try to make the data clear enough that you can argue for your own.
  • Pay-walled content. Everything published here is freely accessible.
  • Analysis without caveats. If the data is shaky, we say so, even when the headline number would be more compelling without the caveat.

Network

Gaither Research operates as the independent research arm of a small family of related work:

  • Gaither Dynamic is the consulting practice that funds and supports this research. They build data dashboards for governments and agencies, with deep experience in homeless services. If you need custom dashboards, data engineering, or program evaluation work for an agency or organization, Gaither Dynamic is where to start.
  • CoC Alliance is an initiative supporting Continuum of Care collaboration across communities. If you work inside a CoC and want to connect with peers facing similar challenges, that's the place.

These are separate efforts with different focuses, but they share infrastructure, institutional knowledge, and a commitment to making homelessness data legible.

Licensing

Unless noted otherwise, all original analysis, charts, and writing on this site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. You're welcome to reuse, remix, and build on the work, as long as you credit Gaither Research and link back.

The underlying federal datasets (HUD PIT counts, HUD CoC funding awards, HUD HIC data) remain in the public domain as US government works. UCSF BHHI data is provided under their original license.