Every year the Department of Housing and Urban Development performs a Point in Time count of the homeless. On a single day, usually in winter, teams fan out across the country to count the homeless everywhere at the same time. Here are the PIT counts since they began:
Roughly speaking, this total can be broken into three pieces:
- One-third are individuals who are sheltered.
- One-third are individuals who aren't sheltered.
- One-third are families, nearly all of whom are sheltered.
There are issues with how PIT counts are done, which means these figures are not unanimously agreed on among advocates for the homeless. They are, however, the closest thing we have to a reliable count across time.
The PIT count is also broken down by cities, which are referred to by the obscurely bureaucratic label "Continuum of Care." Don't ask why. Here are the top five cities in the US:
As you can see, New York and Los Angeles are in a class by themselves, accounting for a quarter of all homeless between them.
I feel like we need to have a discussion about White liberals, but without measurables, all I have are a bunch of anecdotes.
Given that this is exactly what I've worked on for 10 years...
There are more/better measures recently, they just aren't quite aggregated as well yet (and they also aren't just 1 single number). But a basic spreadsheet warrior can turn out something decent in an hour at most.
https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/system-performance-measures/#guidance
There are HUD System Performance Measures that measure the number of people served by a CoC (continuum of care) in a given year, as well as what happened to them, how many were new that year vs. repeat clientele, etc.
Oh, also? Continuum of Care makes sense as a term if you know what it is. It's a continuum... of different kinds of services... that provide care. It makes sense if you know anything about homeless/housing services and think about it for like 5 seconds.
Yeah, I thought the same thing about CoC when I read this post. But I worked in human services for years, too.
So about
One in 200 for LA
One in 240 for NYC
One out of 290 for Seattle
I couldn’t get a good answer from Google but it looks like Boise (picked at random) might be one in 250 as well?
All vs maybe one out of 550 for the US overall.
So either my math is bad (possible) or you gotta look at overall population to to get a better idea of who’s in what class.
One would think that after a year plus of using normalization with COVID figures, our erstwhile pundit would do the same here.
Worth noting that the total population of homeless people is considerably less than the amount of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel housing units that was lost over the past 60 years, especially since SRO units were generally affordable even to really poor people in big cities who would otherwise be homeless.
NYC alone lost about 150-200,000 SRO units, more than double their homeless population.
Yep. We've essentially made it illegal for society to accommodate low income Americans, at least in vast swaths of the country. Although American capitalism, in its indefatigable thirst for profits, does seem to have come up with a potential "solution:"
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/magazine/extended-stay-hotels.html
Even those are kind of on the pricy side compared to SROs. If they could do them in a dormitory style (with common kitchens, bathrooms, and showers), then we'd really be talking. That would possibly get you down to the $200-300/month sweet spot for it to be affordable for basically anyone in the US who can even scrape together the equivalent of part-time minimum wage income from work and social benefits.
In-city property owners sold their land and SROs disappeared. No one bothered to replace those units anywhere else, and no one wanted them anywhere else.
Part of the reason why no one's replacing units is because they're much more expensive to replace now. Compared to 30-50 year old structures, there are now requirements for sprinklers and 30-minute rated separations between sleeping units, which means having to use Type X gypsum sheets and caulking at every penetration.
Then suburban zoning limits the density of housing, limiting such high density developments in core areas where land is more expensive, and often land use and/or neighborhood boards have the power to reject development and/or put onerous requirements or block exemptions that make SROs too expensive to develop.
So is this a failure of government, free markets, or both? Asking rhetorically.
I'd put it as a failure of a certain mental model, namely that "all people are mostly like I am".
I understand the impulse to ever stricter building codes, on safety grounds, on efficiency grounds, on "non-one should live like an animal" grounds. And I REALLY appreciate that these provide a floor to what I can expect if I rent, build, or buy a house. (In CA you can real feel the difference in thermal performance between say a building from 1900, from 1950, from 2000, and from 2020 -- I'v lived in all four.) But of course this costs, and it costs a lot!
What appears to be missing from the law (and the impulses that led to it) is an understanding that some people prioritize other aspects of life over these quality minima. And if the choices are "have to live at this quality level -- which will cost you a minimum of $600 a month -- or live on the street" there are people who will choose the street option. Not because wicked capitalism pays them too little, but because the choices they are making about how they want to live and spend their money don't include a $600 housing budget. They're not choice I would make -- but again, I'm precisely the kind of person who wants minimum standards for every piece of housing *I* interact with.
How do we fix this? I do not know.
In principle it's easy -- something like a three tier rating for housing standards, with very clear notification when you buy/rent/build as to what tier you are getting.
BUT of course it's not that simple because the very same people that insist "everyone should live the life they want, that's why we support gay rights, trans, multi-culturalism, women's lib, blah blah" are the same people who insist that no, the choice to live in crappy $150 a month housing, is not one that should be available to anyone regardless of it's that's what they want.
Then throw in the fact that your choices do in fact affect my life. Fires spread, environmental costs.
But on the third hand, how real are those above concerns? How often, REALLY, do fires spread? How much energy or water, REALLY, are being "wasted" by the sort of people who only want to pay $150/month for housing?
Honestly, I think the most serious problem is the "freedom of choices I approve of -- but not of choices I don't approve of" mindset. Everything else can be worked around but not an insistence that everyone has to live in housing standards that I set based on my concerns with scant respect for your concerns.
Ah. Analysis Paralysis.
And then when the fire sprinkler free cheap housing burns down killing everyone inside - like that tower did in London a few years ago - everyone will blame the government for allowing that housing to exist.
Also, I was unaware that people actually “choose” to not pay $600/month rent after a careful analysis and ranking of their budgetary priorities. As opposed to, you know, simply not making enough under “wicked capitalism” to afford a $600/month rent. I guess that makes sense in the same way that I’m currently “choosing” to not fly on my own private jet nor travel around my city in my own private helicopter, as those items don’t fit into my low-six-figure household budget. Likewise, I guess I am “choosing” to not own a $100m home because I’m prioritizing other things in my life, and not because the mortgage servicing it would be more than my entire pretax annual income. So much choice in my life!
In cities where buildings are in contact with one another fires can spread easily. In March a derelict row house across the street from me-- with squatters in it-- caught fire. The flames spread along the roof to adjacent houses on either side, and then to an additional house as well. Two people died in the initial row house to burn, and two of the three other houses were badly damaged, with their residents losing their homes and most of their belongings. Even the third, less damaged house is not livable.
IMO, the fire safety stuff, to the extent it make sense and isn't just a disguised NIMBY tactic, should be non-negotiable.
Not requirements for sprinklers! Tyranny! Unless of course you’re in the building that burbs to the ground killing everyone inside. But I guess if you were, you wouldn’t be around to complain about the deficiency afterwards so who gives a fck what you want. Freedom!!!
"Also, I was unaware that people actually “choose” to not pay $600/month rent after a careful analysis and ranking of their budgetary priorities"
Ahh, I see you have never actually known a homeless person.
Well, then, your opinion means fsckall, doesn't it?
Some of us actually have them as family members and so have some insight into the thinking of at least some of them...
Exactly. Zoning rules and new requirements made it nigh-impossible to replace the ones that were lost.
Your math is off. Maybe you're using metro area numbers?
My figures yield this:
NYC -- One in 106
LA Co. -- One in 157
Seattle/King Co. - One in 195
USA -- One in 572
That response was to DTI
You should probably use metro area numbers because when someone becomes homeless in a suburb they usually migrate to the city, as that’s where the free services tend to be. (Not to mention that many suburbs simply are designed to be hostile to anyone on foot/not in a car, and many suburbs have little to no truly public spaces anymore where a homeless person can linger before being pushed to move.)
People who lose their homes in gated communities don’t become homeless in gated communities after all. They get expelled and have to go somewhere else. A similar coercive “self-deportation” effect occurs in many wealthy suburbs built without gates too. And like young gays expelled from their homophobic families discover, cities tend to be the place of last resort for the people other communities want to throw away. (This is why you also shouldn’t look at the number of gays in a city and divide it by just the city’s population and conclude “oh one in 10 people overall must be gay!” as it might very well be in many central cities.)
I went to a 'House Part y' (really a fundraiser) for South OC/North San Diego* Dem congressman Mike Levine once. It was in a 'gated community' , which I thought ironic. Walls for relatively wealthy Dem donors (last name Joshua IIRC) but no walls for the country.
It depends on the local government/county/CoC set up. And CoC as the measurement unit is definitely a weird one, and I should know since I've worked in homeless services in 5 different ones in New England. There's usually a kind of power law about the homeless population in the region where the major city at the center has at least half the homeless population even if it's only 25% of the total metro population, then the secondary cities each have around a quarter of the homeless population and further down from there. It really means that the major city homeless populations have a much higher rate of homelessness and it's not all because people go to the city to find services when they become homeless, it can be because people go there because it's where there are still very poor neighborhoods with low rent or where they have a low wage job and think a couple weeks in an extended stay motel will get them through or it's where the detox is that they leave and then find out they can't go back to live with family unless they actually stay sober.
I've been trying to shout it out for twenty years, Homelessness is a national problem, and it needs a national solution.
It is also becoming apparent that small minority, O.5% or something of the population, prefers to be "sans-maisons." (I've also been advocating that we use that term for our less fortunate citizens, yet not having any hope for that campaign.)
Sans-Maisons has big "it's not a crackhouse, it's a crackhome" energy.
No discussion of homelessness can leave out addiction and mental health issues which are an enormous part of the problem. Both have been exacerbated by the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Idk if it's true, but I do wonder if the institutional failure underlying the crisis in health services for the mentally ill doesn't also underlie the response by municipalities to essentially criminalize homelessness for good. That way at least the jails are full.
Time was that being a hobo was not stigmatized. Many a GenX child dressed up as one for Halloween.