Sustainability at the edge of chaos: its limits and possibilities in public health.

This paper critically reviews the expanding literature on applications of sustainability to healthcare policy and planning. It argues that the concept has been overgeneralized and has become a buzzword masking disparate agendas. It ignores the insights of the newest generation of systems theory on complex systems on the ubiquity of far-from-equilibrium conditions. Yet, a central meaning often ascribed to sustainability is the level continuation of healthcare programs and their institutionalization. Sustainability is only coherent in health care when it is more narrowly delimited to involve public health and treated as only one of several evaluative criteria that informs not only the continuation of programs but more often their expansion or contraction as needs dynamically change.

The geography of adult homelessness in the US: Validation of state and county estimates.

This study models geographic variations in the US in lifetime occurrence of homelessness, length of homeless experience, and point-in-time estimates based on socioeconomic, demographic, and disability indicators, among 13,931 respondents in the National Comorbidity Replication and the National Latino Asian American surveys. It uses a small area estimation methodology to estimate county and state levels of homelessness. This study demonstrates high validity for the state estimates, but not for counties. Overall, the model generates a point-in-time estimate of adult homeless persons at 377,000, and an adult lifetime rate of 4.7% of the household adult population.