OK, We Still Don’t Know : Census Bureau Tried, but Counting Homeless Is Tough
How many homeless people live in the United States? Seven million, insists Mitch Snyder, an advocate who works on behalf of the homeless in Washington. Others say that the number may be as low as 250,000.
The U.S. Census Bureau Tuesday night tried for the first time to determine what the true number is. The enumerators concentrated initially on canvassing shelters and cheap hotels before fanning out to parks, alleys, highway underpasses and far more dangerous places. The ambitious effort was flawed. Census monitors found many homeless people who were not counted. Still, the tally was the first systematic attempt to count the nation’s down and out.
Census officials made no pretense of coming up with a complete count. They had hoped for a fairly accurate picture of the nation’s shelters and flophouses, as well as a glimpse of who the homeless are. But if more such efforts are necessary in the future, a second survey of the shelters should be taken within a week to provide a comparison, and allow for an estimate that could make up for any undercount.
And, let there be no doubt, there was an undercount. Wide areas went unchecked in South-Central Los Angeles, for example. Census officials have acknowledged an undercount of migrant workers in North San Diego County, and a recount is planned there--possibly the only one in the nation. Finding people who sleep in canyons and fields, sometimes literally in holes in the ground miles from a road, is one of most difficult tasks for census workers and will require special procedures. The accuracy of the count in Orange County was complicated by the tendency of homeless people there to drop out of sight, especially at night. Field enumerators were surprised they found so few of the homeless living on the streets. Many retreat to cars or cheap motels after dark.
Homeless people are mobile. Some are cynical about contact with government institutions. Others are mentally ill or just plain scared. But they are also among the poorest Americans and stand to benefit from a more equitable distribution of the $30 billion in federal aid allocated to cities and counties based on census figures.
There may be no way to determine, without controversy, how many homeless people the special tally missed. But while the totals are incomplete, the needs are clearly there, and they are great. That alone must prompt the government to invest more in health care, job training and affordable housing to help them.
