Four Thousand. Working at an organization that provides services to those experiencing homelessness, I often find myself trying to explain to others the depth of homelessness in our city. When I do that, I find myself repeating the same number: 4,000. Four thousand, as I’ve said nearly as many times to my family and my friends, is the number of people who are homeless on any given night in Baltimore City.
I both love and hate the statistic. I hate that I go to sleep every night knowing 4,000 people are not in their own beds. I hate that that this number is an increase from the number of people who were homeless just five years ago. At the same time, I like the power behind the number. Sometimes, even when stories on the news or seeing people on the street doesn’t seem to give anyone pause, that number (four thousand) gets the people around me to listen. Gets jaws to drop. And gets some people thinking.
While I appreciate the headline, it is important to examine the fine print. What does this number really mean – for Baltimore and nationally?
For a word with as literal a meaning as “home – less,” the definition of this term is quite complex. HUD, the Federal Government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, breaks homelessness into four categories, but it can be defined as “any individual or family who lack a regular, fixed, and adequate nighttime residence.” This includes people who are staying in cars, outdoors, at train stations, bus stations, and in abandoned buildings. The definition extends to those who stay in temporary shelters, those who are about to exit institutions (i.e., prisons) without a housing plan, and those who are about to lose their housing without knowing where they’ll go next.
Every two years, state agencies attempt to count the number of individuals experiencing homelessness in their area. Unsurprisingly, this is not an exact science. While some metrics are easy to keep track of, like the number of folks who exit an institution, the number of people sleeping in cars or outdoors is an estimate. Still, we use this data to track homelessness across the country, so it provides a starting point for comparing homelessness nationwide.
These numbers are dramatic: In New Orleans, around 6,700 people are experiencing homelessness, In New York, more than 50,000. These numbers can grab attention, but they fail to provide a comparison between these municipalities. In order to really compare the prevalence of homelessness, it is necessary to discuss them all via the same metrics.
The United State Census does make an effort to capture those experiencing homelessness in its counts. Although these are never exact measurements, the fact that the homeless are theoretically included in the reported population for an area allows us to make some comparisons between a city’s homeless population and its total population. For the purposes of these calculations, I looked at HUD and census data from 2011.
How does Baltimore stack up against urban giants like New York, or smaller cities like New Orleans? In order to compare the homeless populations in each, I calculated the ratio of homeless persons to the general population. In Baltimore, one in every 150 people was experiencing homelessness in 2011. For every 149 people with housing here, another lacks a stable nighttime dwelling.
Homelessness is more prevalent in cities, but not always more widespread in large cities compared with smaller ones. In Detroit, a city of 706,000 people, one in every 225 individuals is experiencing homelessness. Comparatively, in the much smaller New Orleans (population 360,000), one in every 54 might be homeless on any given night. While Detroit has more homeless individuals than New Orleans, it also has a larger proportion of the city housed.
With these metrics, we can begin to compare the problem of homelessness across the nation – one in 150 people in Baltimore, one in 160 people in New York City, and one in 84 people in Los Angeles are experiencing homelessness. These numbers tell a very different story than comparing homeless populations by sheer volume.
One-hundred-and-fifty people. Fifty-four people. These numbers are not as attention-grabbing as simply saying there are 4,000 people experiencing homelessness, but it might be a more straightforward evaluation. Baltimore has 10 percent of the amount of homeless people as in Los Angeles, but is keeping its population housed almost twice as effectively. This distinction matters in the race to end homelessness. While we cannot necessarily say that a city with more homeless people is in better shape, keeping a larger portion of a population housed indicates which cities have stronger policies and better practices for ending homelessness.
photo: Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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