MANY city dwellers do their best not to see the homeless people who share their streets and pavements. Donald Trump once famously insisted that his security guards clear all tramps and panhandlers from the pavement in front of Trump Tower. Even when the homeless aren’t being chased away, they can seem invisible. In 2014, the New York City Rescue Mission, a shelter, conducted a social experiment, Make Them Visible, in which they filmed participants walking past relatives disguised as homeless people. None of the participants noticed their relations sitting on the street. “We don’t look at them. We don’t take a second look,” said Michelle Tolson, then director of public relations for the organisation, at the time.
Every two years, however, American cities make a huge effort to take note of their homeless populations as part of the federally mandated “point-in-time” survey. Volunteers and shelter workers search pavements, parks, and tunnels to count how many of their city’s residents are living without shelter on a given night. The data is combined with a tally of shelter beds to gauge the success of the previous year’s service efforts and to estimate how many people will need shelter in the coming year. In 2014 , 1.49 million people used homeless shelters and 578,424 were recorded as being without shelter: sleeping on the streets, in tents, in cars, and other exposed places. Cities completed the 2016 point-in-time count in January.
The count is a critical supplement to shelter programmes' year-long tallies, which only record the number of people actively seeking help. It also helps fill out nationwide data and federal reports to provide a more complete picture of homelessness in America. The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses this information to determine funding for cities and to design programs and initiatives, such as Barack Obama’s proposal to spend $11 billion helping homeless families.
But the count is a flawed measure. Counting on one night of the year, every two years, is likely to have its limits. For example, the count is made in January, when icy weather makes an accurate tally of the homeless especially difficult. Many people seek temporary shelter with friends or family, or take refuge in hidden locations that volunteers don’t find. Walking a city, counting heads seems a rather crude, old-fashioned method of collecting data. But a better approach has yet to be found. The result is that the homeless remain, to some extent, invisible even in data and census records that seek to make them visible.
If homeless people are not seen, it is difficult to tackle the problems they face. As Giselle Routhier, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless in New York, explains, “If you don’t have an accurate read of the problem, you can’t accurately identify solutions.”
Correction: the original version of this article suggested that Michelle Tolson is still director of the New York City Mission. She has left the organisation.
