Malcom Applegate took extreme action to leave his wife, who he says started showing controlling behaviour towards him. Applegate left home without telling a soul, and slept rough in the woods next to a community centre for the elderly, where he’d been working as a gardener. He did this for ten years, before moving into Emmaus Greenwich, a homeless shelter in south London.

One in five young people in the UK have sofa-surfed in the past year and almost half of them have done so for more than a month. In a city – and a country – that is among the wealthiest in the world, how can this be possible? A new report by the London Assembly housing committee on hidden homelessness is a timely reminder of an issue that goes unseen by most of the public and by many local and national politicians.

Gilles Chiasson knows all too well what it’s like to live on the streets of Montreal, fighting off frigid temperatures and feelings of social disconnection as people bustle about their busy lives around him, hardly sparing a glance. While it has been many years since he last slept on a sidewalk, Chiasson hasn’t forgotten the icy loneliness. Now he is looking to reach out to the homeless people of Montreal, offering warmth for both the body and the heart.

Frustrations were bubbling over in Anaheim where the city council voted to declare a state of emergency over the issue of homelessness in the early morning hours Wednesday following a tense meeting that lasted hours. There were heated words inside the Anaheim City Council chamber — pitting neighbor against neighbor — as activists and others came to share their views on a tent city in the shadow of Angel Stadium where about 422 homeless people live.

On what is likely the last clear day in Florida before Hurricane Irma's monster wind and rain, social workers and police officers are giving Miami's estimated 1,100 homeless people a stark choice: Come willingly to a storm shelter, or be held against their will for a mental health evaluation.

One in every 5 of the Los Angeles Community College District’s 230,000 students is homeless, and nearly two-thirds can’t afford to eat properly, according to a new survey commissioned by the system’s board of trustees. The study looked at students with unstable housing and ”food insecurity,” which is defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as lacking enough to eat to sustain an active, healthy life.

Jennifer Carr knows she's not the profile of a typical college student. The Detroit-area woman is 37 and has battled alcohol and heroin addiction. She's also been homeless in the past and even now is categorized as someone who is precariously housed.

Accueil Bonneau, a local group that offers a drop-in day centre and variety of services for homeless men, partnered with Montreal urban beekeeping company Alvéole four years ago.

Los Angeles County’s homeless population has soared 23% over last year despite increasing success in placing people in housing, according to the latest annual count released Wednesday. The sharp rise, to nearly 58,000, suggested that the pathway into homelessness continues to outpace intensifying efforts that — through rent subsidies, new construction, outreach and support services — got more than 14,000 people permanently off the streets last year.

It was his first hot shower in more than a decade. Rob Marriner said he stood underneath the water for one hour, until it ran cold. Then he went to sleep for nine hours - the longest he has been able to sleep in years. Marriner had been homeless since 1984. For 33 years he roamed the streets of West Auckland.

Think Salesforce, but for homelessness.

It was 3am at a secluded Las Vegas intersection, a place home to little else except the occasional homeless person sleeping on a bed of gravel. A figure strode back and forth, his attention drawn to a motionless form under some blankets. The man, identified by police as Shane Schindler, 30, pulled a hood over his head. He lifted a four-pound hammer with both hands to “generate maximum force”, according to police, and brought it down on the recumbent shape “with the intent to kill”.

Dana Burnell said he’d rather be working. But that’s difficult when you’re homeless and struggling with substance abuse issues, he said, standing at the intersection of Somerset and Franklin streets in Portland holding a cardboard sign that asks for money so he can buy something to eat. “I’ve always been a working man,” he said on a recent weekday morning, shortly before a driver handed him $2. “I write ‘work’ on my sign and get few offers.”

A few days before Christmas 2016, a phone call took place that no one could have predicted. One of the world’s most esteemed HIV doctors, Professor Sheena McCormack – whose life’s work as an epidemiologist has been to track and fight the virus – picked up the phone to deliver a message that would make headline news: In the space of 12 months, the number of gay men in London being diagnosed with HIV had dropped by 40%. Across England it was down by a third.

A Portland baby is dead after being found last week in freezing temperatures with his homeless mother in a bus stop along Southeast Powell Boulevard. The infant, found Jan. 9, marks the fifth death on Portland's streets during the cold weather this year. Four homeless people died of exposure in the first 10 days of 2017. A week after the baby was found, it's still unclear whether he died of exposure hours after being born outdoors or was stillborn.

A couple who missed their last train home and were stranded in freezing January weather say their lives have changed after they met a kind-hearted homeless man. Charlotte Ellis and boyfriend Taylor Waldon, both aged 22, were on their way home from a night out in Covent Garden, London, when they realised the train station gates were closed and, in their "drunken state", they had missed their chance to get back.

Charlotte Ellis and her boyfriend Taylor Waldon only went out to get a few drinks – they weren’t expecting to return with a homeless friend. On January 4th, the couple …

A women was ready to catch the bus to go home at night,but then she realized she couldn’t go anywhere, except on foot. While walking toward the bus stop, a homeless man approached Caroline Santana asking for some change. She had been searching her purse for her bus pass, and promised the man she would give him some money as soon as she could find any. Soon enough the Brazilian student started thinking she didn’t have the bus pass—or money to pay the fare—and started to worry.

In a remote corner of Colorado, a radical experiment is underway to rehabilitate the state’s most downtrodden residents. By Will McGrath.