Читать книгу In the Midst of Plenty - Marybeth Shinn - Страница 22

We have HUD's estimate of 553,000 people on a single night in January, 2018. Given the likely undercounts of people staying in unsheltered locations, the total number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. nationwide on a particular night in January 2018 was probably more than 600,000.

But what about longer periods? Over the course of a year, we believe the number is closer to 1.6 million people. HUD's estimate of the number of different people who used a shelter at some point during the course of a year was just over 1.4 million in 2017, dropping from almost 1.6 million in 2007.¹⁶ To get a total that includes people who were unsheltered, we might add another 200,000. That is the unsheltered PIT count, which as we have already pointed out, misses many people who were on the streets that night. It also misses people who were unsheltered on a different night during the year. But many people who experience unsheltered homelessness also use shelters at other times and are already in the 1.4 million. If about the same number who are missed also use shelters at any point over the year, then the total number of people experiencing literal homelessness over the course of a year may be 1.6 million.^17,18

Thus far we have estimates of people homeless on a particular night (sheltered and unsheltered, about 600,000 people) and people homeless over the course of a year in shelters (about 1.6 million people). But a year is a short period of time. Much larger estimates of the number of people experiencing homelessness come from asking people who are living in conventional housing about homelessness they experienced at some time during their lives and not just in the past year or two.

Back in 1990, researchers led by Bruce Link undertook a study of public attitudes toward homelessness with a rigorous sample survey of adults in households with telephones in the continental United States. Because they thought that those attitudes might be influenced by people's personal experiences of homelessness, they decided to ask about those experiences and then to ask some follow‐up questions to anyone who acknowledged having been homeless in the past. Survey organizations charge researchers by the minute for asking questions, thus the organization Link hired to do the survey had to come up with some sort of estimate of the number of people who would be asked the follow‐up questions. Organizational representatives decided it would be such a small number that it would not be worth any charge. (After all, this was a household survey—anyone currently homeless or staying in a prison or mental hospital—who might be at higher risk of having been homeless in the past—would not be included.) They guessed wrong.

Fully 14.0% of the 1,507 survey respondents answered yes to the question “Have you ever had a time in your life when you considered yourself homeless?” and 4.6% said they had been homeless between 1985 and 1990 (Link et al., 1994, p. 1909). Respondents who classified themselves as having been homeless were asked three follow‐up questions: “While you were homeless, did you ever (1) sleep in a park, in an abandoned building, in the street, or in a train or bus station?; (2) sleep in a shelter for homeless people or in another temporary residence because you did not have a place to stay?; (3) sleep in a friend's or relative's home because you were homeless?” (p. 1909). A little over half of the people who said they had been homeless at some time in their life, 7.4% of the survey respondents, said yes to one of the first two questions and were classified as literally homeless.¹⁹ The other people, who said yes to only to the last question, were classified as precariously housed. The sequence of questions did not allow the researchers to determine definitively the percentage of people who had been literally homeless in the past 5 years, but 3.1% of the sample said they had been homeless in the past 5 years and also met the criteria for literal homelessness at some point in their lives.

The researchers asked about total duration of homelessness (including doubling up): the most frequent reply (46%) was between a month and a year. Only 8% had been homeless for less than a week, 33% between a week and a month, and 13% for over a year. In 1990 there were slightly over 185 million adults living in the United States, so the researchers estimated that 13.5 million adults had been literally homeless at some time in their lives, and nearly 26 million had considered themselves homeless if doubling up is included (p. 1910). The fact that many people are homeless for fairly short periods is also shown in later analyses of shelter records by Culhane et al. (2007; Kuhn & Culhane, 1998) and explains why the numbers for lifetime homelessness are so much larger than the numbers for any given night or year.

Estimates of people homeless or precariously housed at some time during a year show a substantial increase between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. The percentage of adult respondents to the national General Social Survey who replied yes to a combined question about whether the respondent “had to temporarily live with others or in a shelter or ‘on the street’” during a single year increased from 2.57% when the survey was conducted in 1988–1991 to 4.13% when they survey was conducted in 2004,²⁰ almost as high as Link et al.'s (1994) estimate (4.6%) for a parallel measure over a five‐year period. This, of course, is before the Annual Homelessness Assessment Reports that have shown more recent decreases.

Studies that were smaller than Link's (Toro, Tompsett, et al., 2007), more specialized (Rosenheck & Fontana, 1994) or more local (Culhane, Dejowski, Ibanez, Needham, & Macchia, 1994) have, like Link, found much higher rates when homelessness is measured over a period of time longer than 1 year. The rates are particularly high for young adults (Morton et al., 2018).