How many homeless?

ADVOCATES for the homeless are understandably annoyed at "shelter night," the Census Bureau's well-publicized effort to count the homeless population. For years these groups have traded on the figure of three million homeless--1.2 per cent of the nation's population. The media generally report this figure. Politicians and celebrities cite it. Yet every systematic survey of homelessness since 1984 has put the figure at between 250,000 and 600,000, with the average at about 400,000. The only study to reach a seven-figure estimate, Homelessness: A Forced March to Nowhere, was published by activist Mitch Snyder in 1982, and was based on a phone survey of shelter operators across the country.

The tricky part of any attempt to count the homeless is to determine the ratio of street homeless to shelter homeless. We know there are approximately 275,000 beds in shelters throughout the country. A HUD survey conducted in January 1984 found only 70 per cent of shelter beds occupied. Even assuming full occupancy, and even defining each of the approximately 110,000 persons in public mental hospitals as "homeless," the street-to-shelter ratio would have to be 8 to 1 for there to be three million homeless. Advocates for the homeless insist that street people go to great lengths to hide themselves and are grossly undercounted, but most studies have found the average annual street-to-shelter ratio to be less than 1 to 1, far less in those cities, such as New York, where shelters are readily available.

Researchers generally agree that between 35 and 40 per cent of homeless individuals have severe drug or alcohol problems, and 50 per cent are disabled by mental illness. A 1988 Urban Institute study was the first to look at other characteristics, and found that 56 per cent had served five or more days in jail, while more than 25 per cent had served time in state or federal prisons, implying felony convictions. Almost 50 per cent never finished high school, and only 5 per cent had steady employment. This contrasts sharply with the image portrayed by the media: the Center for Media and Public Affairs reports that only 12 per cent of the homeless interviewed for the three networks' evening news shows were unemployed, and only 3 per cent were drug or alcohol users. Their survey covered 103 stories on homelessness broadcast over a thirty-month period.

To what extent, then, is homelessness strictly a housing problem? We might start with the 10 per cent of homeless households made up of families with children. These families are poor, but relatively few members are drug addicts or mentally ill. However, most of these families are headed by females--half of them never married--suggesting that even in this group few are homeless solely because of a lack of affordable housing.

In New York City an average of 12,000 families are homeless over the course of a year. Surely the city's housing supply--1.9 million rental units--could be stretched to accommodate a less than 1 per cent rise in inhabitants. Where rents are not controlled this is accomplished by means of upward migration: affluent tenants move to better apartments, their old units are acquired by those just below them on the housing ladder, eventually freeing up the least desirable units for the poor and homeless. But one of the strictest rent-control laws in the nation induces New Yorkers to hold onto their apartments long after their incomes have risen, their families have grown, and, in many cases, they themselves have left town.