"Since 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has released an annual report on the extent of homelessness in the United States—the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR). The report documents how many people are using shelter programs for homeless people and how many people are in unsheltered locations often referred to as ""the street."" The AHAR is submitted each year to the U.S. Congress, and its contents are used to inform federal, state, and local policies to prevent and end homelessness.

This report is the second part of a two-part series. The first part is called The 2014 Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness: Part 1 of the 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress and was published in October 2014. The Part 1 report provides estimates of homelessness based on the Point-in-Time (PIT) count data gathered by communities throughout the country in the last 10 days of January. The estimates are provided at the national-, state-, and CoC-levels.

Part 2 of the 2014 AHAR builds on the Part 1 report by adding 1-year estimates of sheltered homelessness based on data from Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS). The HMIS estimates provide detailed demographic information about people who use the nation’s shelters during a 12-month period. New to the 2014 AHAR are a discussion of domestic violence victims in the homeless shelter system and a discussion of various types of housing instability in the U.S."