chronic homelessness

Cities have tasked police and sanitation workers with dismantling homeless camps that they say pose a risk to health and safety. But that's meant some displaced people are losing needed medications.

"Street medicine" programs, like one in Atlanta, seek out people living in back alleys and under highways. The public health outreach improves patients' health and is cost-effective, hospitals find.

The population of people who are homeless increased for the first time since 2010, according the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and many shelters are having to turn people away.

Residents who lost homes in the wildfires two months ago are adding to the chronic homelessness problem in the city of Santa Rosa, where more than 3,000 people were already living on the streets.

Utah has reduced its chronically homeless population by 91 percent since 2005. But like many places, it lacks affordable housing, leaving more than 14,000 people in the state homeless this year.

Over the past decade, Utah's toughest cases of homeless people dropped to fewer than 200, from nearly 2,000. Utah's size and support from Mormon leaders are among the reasons for its success.