The HEARTH-Act (Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act) was signed by President Obama on May 20, 2009, to fight increasing homelessness. The act focuses on homelessness prevention, re-housing, housing consolidation and the definition of new homeless categories. It reauthorizes the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Programs of 1987.

The McKinney-Vento is a United States federal law that provides money for homeless shelter programs. Signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan, due to a homeless crisis in the 80’s, it’s been reauthorized several times. Still, homelessness persists in the USA. Some people declaim that the solution is not to give more money, and that the problem is deep and complex. It includes education, resources management and opportunities, overpopulation, migration, and other factors that can’t be solved just by making shelters.

The term `Homeless Children and Youths’
(A) means individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence and
(B) includes– (i) children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; are living in emergency or transitional shelters; are abandoned in hospitals; or are awaiting foster care placement; (ii) children and youths who have a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designed for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings (iii) children and youths who are living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings; and (iv) migratory children (as such term is defined in section 1309 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) who qualify as homeless for the purposes of this subtitle because the children are living in circumstances described in clauses (i) through (iii).