Census Bureau Plans Special Effort to Count the Least Visible
The Census Bureau is setting aside one night--March 20--for counting the homeless population.
The effort on Street and Shelter Night, dubbed S-Night, will produce the first real nationwide estimate of the number of Americans of no fixed address.
Demographers say that any information will be more accurate than what is available now, but critics say that the plan can’t possibly work well enough to draw a true picture of the situation.
“We know and they know you can’t count people on streets,” said Mitch Snyder, an advocate for the homeless. The government “will use these numbers to hurt homeless people,” by representing the homeless population as smaller than it is, he said.
Cynthia Taeuber, a Census Bureau population specialist who helped to devise the S-Night plan, said the bureau understands Snyder’s concern and has tried to make federal agencies aware of the limitations of the data.
On S-Night, between 6 p.m. and midnight March 20, census agents in each U.S. city will go to every shelter or hotel for the homeless. From 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. on March 21, they will count people on the streets. From 4 a.m. until 6:30 a.m., they will be stationed outside abandoned buildings to count people as they emerge.
The effort to count the homeless is expected to cost $2.7 million; the entire 1990 Census is expected to cost $2.6 billion.
About 9,000 canvassers will be employed on S-Night. In many cities, census offices will try to hire homeless people and social workers to help with the count.
Snyder doubts that it will work.
As well as he knows the homeless people of Washington, he suggests that he could find perhaps 100 of them on any given night, although thousands are believed to be living on the streets.
“If we could find them, so could the people who would beat them over the head with a 2-by-4 and rob them. So could the wind and the rain,” Snyder said.
People on the streets have “absolutely no incentive” to identify themselves as among the homeless, he said.
“You’re on the street at 2 in the morning, carrying a plastic bag, and somebody with a clipboard comes up to you. You have no reason to believe they’re from the Census,” Synder said. And, he added, “every official contact you have is a negative one.”
Also, he said, to identify oneself as homeless is “the final stage of brokenness.”
For every person who is “visibly homeless, there are immense numbers who are working very hard” at appearing not to be homeless, he said.
Why? Because the instant you’re identified as homeless, Snyder said, “libraries are closed to you, public buildings are closed to you, restrooms are closed to you. You have no place to clean up a little or sit down and relax a moment, the moment you look homeless.”
Census Bureau officials acknowledge the difficulties of the effort.
“We’re not pretending we’re going to find everybody,” Taeuber said.
Concern for the security of census-takers will limit the count, she said. “We won’t be searching in cars and climbing onto roofs and into dumpsters. We won’t be going into abandoned buildings.”
They also won’t awaken people found sleeping in doorways and on heating grates. For such people, the census takers will guess characteristics such as age and race.
The bureau believes that the increased number of shelters will help the completeness of the count. “It appears most homeless people and families are in shelters, though nobody knows the ratio between shelters and the street,” she said.
The bureau also has been careful to avoid any dispute over who should be defined as homeless.
There is disagreement among advocates, policy-makers and governments as to whether the count should include just those on the streets, or families forced to double up, those who are “on the verge,” meaning they could lose their homes at any time, and those in temporary shelter.
To get around that, census data will not use the word “homeless.” It will describe settings--such as streets, doorways, campgrounds, emergency shelters, apartments with other families. “It will be up to people or organizations to add up the components they think appropriate,” Taeuber said.
Limitations and disagreements taken into account, any numbers will go a long way in helping get a handle on how large the problem is and who is affected, said Thomas Merrick, president of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington agency that studies demographics.
“We know relatively little about the trends and characteristics of the homeless,” Merrick said.
Census data is likely to dispel for good, he said, the “Skid Row” image of homeless people as single men in their 50s with drinking problems. A picture of families--many of them working--could emerge as more prevalent than many think, Merrick said.
Although a few cities have done some fairly good studies, Merrick said, nothing has been done nationally. Estimates of the homeless range from 350,000 to 3 million nationally.
Rich West of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition said pinning down those figures “might help us better structure a response. (But) I’m not convinced if we knew there were exactly 750,000 or 2.4 million that would prompt us to fashion a response any more than we have already.”
He shares Snyder’s concern that the White House and other agencies will fail to recognize the count’s limitations and downplay the true number of homeless.
Better numbers “could be very helpful,” but it’s not an end, he said. “It’s an unfortunate tendency to get caught up in bean-counting and not deal with the problem.”
