More than 600,000 Americans are homeless on a given night, according to the latest government data, which conducts a count on a specific night in January every year. Nearly a quarter are children and a third were living in unsheltered places like parks, cars, or abandoned buildings.

The number of people who are chronically homeless, or who have been continuously homeless for more than one year or experienced at least four episodes over the last three, is over 100,000, and two-thirds go unsheltered. There were more than 57,000 homeless veterans.

The good news is that the government says the numbers have been declining overall. Homelessness declined by 4 percent compared to last year and by 9 percent since the beginning of the recession in 2007. Chronic homelessness has dropped by 25 percent since 2007 and homelessness among veterans went down by 24 percent.

But they aren’t declining everywhere, and some states actually saw huge increases. Five states - California, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas - account for more than half of the country’s homeless population, and of those three saw some of the largest upticks. Homelessness rose by 11.3 percent in New York, by 8.7 percent in Massachusetts, and by 4.5 percent […]