It’s always good to take homelessness stats with a grain of salt. In the US, at least, there’s basically zero real-time tracking of who is unhoused. Instead, estimates are made via some fairly ridiculous processes. For example, some cities or states do it by picking one day every year to send a bunch of social workers and students out to count people sleeping on the street. That’s it. That’s the official stat, for the year, of who is homeless on the street and who is not. There is no baseline model that means you estimate a better number based on that limited observation. It is a guaranteed undercount.
The way in which you count as unhoused varies as well. Living out of your car is not counted in many metrics. Crashing on someone’s couch isn’t counted by many metrics.
It’s all a big clusterfuck and it could all be avoided by just providing housing. No need to even do these big counts if people just have a place to live. But instead, capitalism.
It’s always good to take homelessness stats with a grain of salt. In the US, at least, there’s basically zero real-time tracking of who is unhoused. Instead, estimates are made via some fairly ridiculous processes. For example, some cities or states do it by picking one day every year to send a bunch of social workers and students out to count people sleeping on the street. That’s it. That’s the official stat, for the year, of who is homeless on the street and who is not. There is no baseline model that means you estimate a better number based on that limited observation. It is a guaranteed undercount.
The way in which you count as unhoused varies as well. Living out of your car is not counted in many metrics. Crashing on someone’s couch isn’t counted by many metrics.
It’s all a big clusterfuck and it could all be avoided by just providing housing. No need to even do these big counts if people just have a place to live. But instead, capitalism.
For sure, these kinds of stats give a minimum bound, but the reality is almost certainly a lot worse.