That's completely biased though. You can only know who is chronically homeless AFTER the fact. So this whole celebration of reducing chronic homelessness is more likely just a PR piece.

No... that's not a fair comment.

We are measuring it. People are constantly going through rough patches and become homeless. In some cases, most cases, they get help "soon" and get into a home. In other cases, they don't. This article is about the latter cases.

Your statement suggests that the efforts to reduce chronic homelessness compete with efforts to help the temporarily homeless. The article doesn't suggest that is the case.

That seems like a fairly straight-forward statistic based on a snapshot in time (e.g. when you do the survey): Has the person in question been: (a) living on the streets for more than a year, or four times in the past three years, and (b) has a "disabling condition" (e.g. serious mental illness, an addiction or a physical disability or illness)