The Harsh Reality of Living on the Streets as a Woman
Homelessness among women is increasing in Nashville, and while sleeping on the streets is not safe for anyone, it can spell disaster for a woman.
In a recent conversation with a female Contributor vendor, she confirmed that to stay safe on the streets, unaccompanied women usually find a partner to protect them. Or they don’t sleep at night and try to find safe spots during the day.
Age, shape, or situation of a woman doesn’t matter. “There are predators everywhere,” she said.
Earlier this month I took a tour of the new Women’s Guest House of the Nashville Rescue Mission and saw for myself that the building, which opened last year and had intentionally increased previous capacity, was already bursting at the seams with overflow mats in community rooms.
In January of this year, 37 percent of the overall homeless population (3,270 individuals) recorded in Nashville were women, according to our community’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) report.
Since HMIS data has improved over the past few years, and more agencies are entering into it, it is hard to compare whether the proportion of women has increased. That’s where I look at the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count. The PIT Count data only takes a snapshot of homelessness one night. It also only includes people sleeping in temporary places including emergency shelters and outdoors. We know that the numbers are usually undercounts because not all people who sleep outdoors are found and counted on that one night. However, the methodology over the past few years has more or less remained the same, which allows us to review some trends.
The percentage of women experiencing homelessness in comparison to the overall homeless population has increased from 25.3 percent in 2018 to 32.1 percent in 2024, according to Nashville PIT Count data. Nationwide, in 2018, 39.1 percent of the overall homeless population were women, which compares to 39.2 percent in 2024.
The charts below show the percentage of women of the overall homelessness population in the nation. When you examine the data, keep in mind that during 2021, many communities, including Nashville, opted to forgo an outdoor count due to the COVID pandemic, which explains the drop in numbers of homeless women for that year. But pay attention to the percentage of women as a portion of overall homelessness to get a better feel of the trend in this subpopulation.
In comparison to the national trend, Nashville saw an increase of 6.8 percentage points between 2018 and 2024 in the share of women who were homeless, living in shelters or staying outdoors.
Homeless families are often led by a single head of household, who is most often female. Yet, an article published by the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2022, pointed out that while the proportion of females among the overall homeless population has remained relatively steady, individual women without children have increased at a rapid pace. The unsheltered PIT count of homeless females only on very rare occasions include children, and I found that holds true in Nashville’s outdoor count.
Between 2019, when Nashville counted a low of 121 women living outdoors on one night in January, and 2024, we saw a 69.4-percent increase in homelessness among females living outdoors.
Domestic violence is a leading cause for homelessness among women. In addition, we have also seen a huge increase in families falling into homelessness in the past few years. This trend is not necessarily reflected in local HMIS data, but holds true when talking to local family services providers, especially the Nashville Rescue Mission.
In July 2023, the Urban Institute and the Hub for Urban Initiatives published the first Los Angeles County Women’s Needs Assessment. While this study focused on surveys conducted in California, general experiences hold true nationwide.
Based on that assessment, more than 90 percent of the women surveyed had experienced “some form of victimization in their lifetime, including having something stolen (73.8 percent), being repeatedly harassed or threatened (57.1 percent), and being threatened, physically hit, or made to feel unsafe by a romantic partner (48.4 percent).”
Furthermore, the report confirmed what we have been hearing women and service providers say for years. A large percentage of women’s homelessness was caused by their experience of threats or violence from a romantic partner. Yet their experience of violence did not stop when they left the home they had shared with their partner.
“While experiencing homelessness, 57.9 percent of women had something stolen from them; 43.1 percent were repeatedly harassed or threatened; 37.6 and 35.3 percent witnessed an attack or were attacked themselves, respectively; and 20.4 percent were forced to take part in unwanted sexual activity,” based on the 2023 report.
One of the issues we often forget about is that women still don’t have the earning power of men, which makes them more vulnerable to homelessness after a divorce, even without an experience of violence from their intimate partner. It is also a reality that women experiencing homelessness may be sex trafficked and/or forced into prostitution to survive.
Thus, safety and privacy are the top priorities for women not only when they are experiencing homelessness but also in their search for housing.
In an article published in the Wire in November 2022, Samantha Batko and Lynden Bond, who also helped write the 2023 needs assessment, recommended five ways to better serve women experiencing homelessness:
- Offer housing options that prioritize privacy, safety, and community.
- Address safety considerations across the range of homeless services and housing options.
- Consider how housing prioritization criteria could require women to remain in dangerous situations and remove barriers to programming where possible.
- Create safe spaces for women to support one another.
- Treat women with dignity and respect.
Addressing women’s special needs includes paying attention to unique challenges they face when being homeless, such as:
- The lack of preventive health care such as prenatal care, mammograms, and other regular health check-ups and tests. In addition, the rate of unintended pregnancies is higher than among women who are housed, which can lead to adverse birth outcomes.
- Access to free menstrual products is limited and can have a significant cost.
- Nearly 50 percent of homeless women meet the criteria for a major depressive disorder – twice the rate of women in the general population, according to a 2021 article published on careerandrecovery.org. This data does not include the high percentage rate of women whose extreme mental illness goes untreated.
With noted increases in family homelessness and homelessness among seniors, we cannot overlook the increases in unaccompanied women who have lost their housing.
I will never forget a conversation I once had with an elderly woman. She was probably in her mid-50s, but looked 15-20 years older. She used a walker, and she was on her way to Metro’s Cold Weather shelter. At that time, that shelter was held at an old jail facility, and while advocates generally protested the location, she came up to me making sure that’s where she could go.
She said she felt safe there. Then she shared with me some medical history that very clearly made her fragile. She was there with her male partner, telling me she needed to partner up with someone to avoid ongoing sexual assaults.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to her. But I sure enough will never forget the impression she made on me. Her matter-of-fact approach of telling me, a stranger, why she is seeking a safe place to sleep — just for one night.