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Since critiquing the homeless count is a little bit part of my brand and something I've done professionally for years, here is why I think canceling it could potentially be a GOOD thing if we want it to be… https://twitter.com/robinpetering/status/1336331487839281158
Providers, activists, academics, and electeds are now pretty versed in discussing and acknowledging the flaws and errors of the count but we’ve collectively accepted that the numbers are important despite the “imperfect science” and that it's the “best that we can do.” Sure.
One reason we count is bc it’s required by HUD, but most people don’t realize that HUD only requires every other year. Most communities opt for a biennial count. I believe it's pretty rare to do an annual count. But LA adopted the annual count strategy a few years back.
Why an annual count? In short, primarily so politicians can use numbers to measure progress. If you think it’s to distribute resources appropriately, it’s not. Soooo many other communities do it every other year (and are potentially providing services better than us).
Having an annual count is a HUGE system drain. Sure, we use federal money (a lot of it), but the time, energy, and people input that goes into it basically year-round are massive--for estimates that people will spend months arguing about.
Mind you that all of this effort goes into a project that directly doesn’t provide any support or resources to people experiencing homelessness. Let’s also get into the fact we gather all this sensitive data from our neighbors just to immediately politicize it.
Having an annual count stifles our ability to innovate and *actually* make the methodology better. We are in a constant cycle of planning (aug-dec), counting (jan-mar), data analyzing (apl), data release (jun-jul). This also doesn’t give us the ability to even dig into the data.
I believe that as a researcher when you collect data from human subjects you are ethically obligated to do something with it. When you collect it from vulnerable pops it’s under the promise that that info will be used to make policies, programs, etc, better. Show me we do that.
I’ve been saying forever that we need to be OK with having *pretty good* estimates with larger margins of error or move to a biennial count but we’ve created this annual count beast. An institution and norm that has been impossible to get out of.
People are literally obsessed with the homeless count numbers. We should still be meeting this crisis with the same urgency if the numbers are 60k vs 67,345. We could also expand our ability to estimate and distribute resources, using different tools, methods, approaches.
Obviously estimating the impact of COVID will be incredibly important, but tbd if the count methodology could even do that properly. We should be using this time to actually doing the work and accepting that IT WILL BE OK and maybe it will could better if we want it to be.
