Collect
- Source: GovInfo CHRG (congressional hearings)
- Homelessness-matched, 2010-2025 (~2,800 hearings)
Policymaking · Hearings (GovInfo CHRG)
What Congress actually talks about when homelessness comes up: the themes of congressional hearings, discovered by a transformer topic model, and how they shift over time.
Committee hearings are where Congress gathers testimony and frames a problem. We can't read all 2,800+ homelessness-related hearings by hand, so we let a model read the titles and group them into themes: which lets us see what draws attention (veterans, youth, mental health, funding) and how the mix changes.
Hearings grouped into themes, largest first. Hover a bar for the terms that define it.
The same themes over time (2010-2025). Watch which concerns rise and fall.
Mental health is one of the angles we track within the homelessness corpus. Below is the share of homelessness bills and hearings each year whose title raises mental-health terms: it climbs unevenly, with a notable spike around 2022.
The trend above reads titles. As a check, we pulled the full transcripts for a sample of 100 hearings: mental health is named in almost no titles, yet it runs through most of the actual testimony.
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