Abstract: The  author seeks to examine the status of population that ever lived/never lived in the shelter and houses possessed by their relatives, the frequency of chances to live in the shelter after months and years and their circulation between places of origin and Kanpur city, India. The study is based on primary source of data generated through a comprehensive field survey in Kanpur city carried out during 2012. The study reveals that more than four-fifth of the houseless population has lived in the shelter at least once in their whole lives for some time. Likewise, most of the relatives of the houseless population owned the houses and they are not houseless persons, but less than one-fifth of relatives were houseless too somewhere else in the country. Moreover, more than sixty percent of the houseless people have got the chance to live in the shelter either for some months in a year or for few years, while nearly fourty percent of the houseless persons have never got the chance to live in the shelter in their whole lives and are forced to live as permanent pavement dwellers.