New York City
Wall Street. Broadway. The Empire State Building. Central Park. And 350,000 (estd) unhoused New Yorkers.
Notebook LM Audio Summary (interesting summary by Google’s AI)
In March 2024, 146,547 people slept each night in NYC shelters. Thousands more (there is no reliable number, as the annual HOPE estimate is deeply flawed) slept unsheltered in public spaces, and more than 200,000 people slept temporarily doubled-up in the homes of others. Thus, it can be estimated that more than 350,000 people were without homes in NYC in March 2024.
This figure is wildly different from the reported number of unhoused New Yorkers in 2023.
In November 2023, there were 92,824 homeless people, including 33,365 homeless children, sleeping each night in New York City’s main municipal shelter system. A total of 23,945 single adults slept in shelters each night in November 2023.
Although New York City has appalling and rampant mismanagement and fraud within its $4 billion homeless shelter system, it is the proposed “recalculation” of the actual number of homeless people that should immediately bring things to a grinding halt.
IF the numbers, suggested by the Coalition for the Homeless, holds, then it can be taken as a not-so-rigorous basis for recalculating the rest of the country.
Granted, to truly triangulate the data and reach an acceptable confidence interval, requires more work and unified datasets,…but…I’ll give you a good guess as to what is not available in the United States: a reliable dataset.
Even the PiT count, conducted once per year, on a cold day in January, is woefully insufficient, but it is presently the most “accepted” and “budgetary significant” assessment. After all, HUD is modeling some of its funding based on the outcomes of the PiT count.
For reference, the 2023 PiT count estimated that 653,000 individuals are unhoused in the United States.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that the numbers from NYC are representative, including all variations of those who do not have a fixed address, thereby meeting the consideration of being “unhoused”.
With the Coalition for the Homeless’s data in mind, the following consideration emerges:
Wikipedia provides the basics.
The Coalition for the Homeless data shows 350,000 homeless. Whereas, based on the number of NYC population, 8,258,035 (as of Census 2023), an estimated 4.24% meet the Coalition’s definition of “homeless”.
Calculating cities of interest, and the entire United States, based on the same percentage, the following emerges:
Certainly, to generalize 4.24% across the entire United States, or even specific cities, is to take n=1 (NYC) and applying the same math upon all. The data integrity is, thereby, on shaky legs. If it hasn’t toppled over altogether.
However, the illustration is that the PiT count is woefully inaccurate, and the NYC’s Coalition for the Homeless is likely more realistic.
The truth, and actual number of unhoused, is probably somewhere in between.
However, the true picture is not assessed. Which is where the argument becomes circular. The PiT count is the best standardized tool we have, even though we are aware of its deficiencies and inaccuracy.
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~Z.
The elephant in the room is still the upcoming elections...the choice is clear; christofascism or a continuation of the American democratic republic...all other problems are secondary...
It shouldn’t be so hard, but with cities now emboldened to remove housing encampments by force after the Grants Pass decision by SCOTUS, it’s not like anyone is volunteering to “register” as homeless. The numbers will increase even more this year as people displaced completely by the recent hurricanes migrate to find somewhere to live.