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Homelessness in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of homelessness news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about homelessness, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API. The tables measure news coverage, not the number of people who are homeless.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, homelessness took a 36.5% smaller share of news coverage in 2025 than in 2019, falling from 11.01 to 6.99 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Annual homelessness articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, complete years 2019–2025.
December 2019 was the month in which homelessness took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 17.27 articles per 10,000, 1.57 times the 2019 annual share; April 2020 was second, at 15.35.
Basis: Monthly homelessness articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Between 2019 and 2025, an average of 19.58% of each year's homelessness news appeared in December and January, against 16.67% if coverage were spread evenly, while June was the quietest month at 7.08%.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Of US-located homelessness news articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 66.4% were negative in tone, 2.01 times the 33.1% negative share of all US-located news in the same index; across all countries the figures were 65.3% and 33.6%.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 27,026 labelled US-located articles; 99.4% of sampled articles carry a label.
In a global news index, a machine-assigned priority rating placed 78.2% of homelessness articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.84 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 27,197 | 67.5% | 1.39 |
| United Kingdom | 3,478 | 8.63% | 1.48 |
| Canada | 1,451 | 3.6% | 1.68 |
| Australia | 1,187 | 2.95% | 1.37 |
| India | 1,136 | 2.82% | 0.21 |
| Ireland | 705 | 1.75% | 2.43 |
| New Zealand | 553 | 1.37% | 2.12 |
| Brazil | 452 | 1.12% | 1.3 |
| France | 343 | 0.85% | 0.43 |
| Germany | 288 | 0.71% | 0.61 |
| South Africa | 212 | 0.53% | 1.16 |
| Italy | 205 | 0.51% | 0.53 |
| Nigeria | 149 | 0.37% | 0.27 |
| Turkey | 144 | 0.36% | 1.13 |
| Spain | 132 | 0.33% | 0.34 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "homeless" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Homelessness in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/homelessness/