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sllewgh t1_j91dqei wrote

Because this is based on the Point In Time count, this doesn't mean much. They survey folks in city shelters and public places they already happen to know homeless folks gather. It's not a very accurate number.

As someone who works with homeless folks on a regular basis, I haven't heard that things are getting any better. There was some success moving some people into permanent housing during COVID once we fought to finally get the city to stop leaving homeless folks to die in overcrowded shelters where social distancing was impossible. A disproportionate number of COVID deaths in the city were from homeless folks who couldn't protect themselves. As I recall, as of July 2020 when we got them to empty the shelters, around half the COVID deaths were among the homeless.

It's just as likely these numbers are the result of the conditions on the nights of the survey or the mass deaths of the homeless during COVID as it is the result of city action.

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Ms_Cranky_Pants t1_j91qo6h wrote

Yep. Also, the Point in Time count doesn’t even include everyone who meets the definition of “homelessness”. Including people whose living situation is unstable (couchsurfing, staying with family, etc.) or staying in a single room occupancy arrangement (those room rental situations really suck). It’s hard to determine how many people are in those situations, but important to acknowledge, they need access to resources too. “Housing” is the bare minimum, people need agency and some kind of quality of life.

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cuzimmathug t1_j92z2wd wrote

It's also based on one night out of the entire year, specifically one of the coldest nights of the year, intentionally. The federal theory is that "people who CAN find a place to stay but choose not to during bearable weather will be staying somewhere on the coldest night" as if this somehow makes the count more accurate.

Anyway, if you and some friends scrape together enough money for a motel room on the night of the count, you are not considered homeless and will not be counted.

Source: coordinated the PIT count in the midwest. I have a lot of issues with it and am happy to pop off if anyones interested.

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DONNIENARC0 t1_j94jhky wrote

How do they even go about contacting/measuring these people in the first place, coldest night of the year or not?

I would guess there’s practically no chance the overwhelming majortity of the homeless have reliable contact info, and having city agents canvass the entire city is a practical nonstarter

I guess it seems like every method I can think of for attempting to track homelessness would be horrible best.

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cuzimmathug t1_j94uxua wrote

Yeah it is pretty complicated. Some of the bigger cities have lots of canvassers that deploy one night in sections of the city. We had a few volunteers and conducted the count over a few days, but would use the official count date as our point of reference. So the question would be "where are you staying tomorrow night?" or "where did you stay thursday night?" depending on the day.

Lots of cities know where the larger encampments are, though part of what determines a states funding is seeing the numbers go down from year to year. Because of this, lots of shady things take place. In Portland 2 years ago the police swept the local camp sites forcing people to move like 3 days before the count, making it exponentially harder to find and count those people.

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CaptainObvious110 t1_j93mayy wrote

Those people do indeed need resources as well that's true. What I think needs to happen is that people are classified based on why they are homeless.

  1. Loss of job or something else. They need a place to stay temporarily until they can get back on their feet. In the meantime they need to eat and have medical care.

  2. People with mental illness that can be treated and they can hold down a job and just need some stability for the time being.

  3. People with mental and or physical illnesses so severe that they honestly CANNOT hold down a job. As a result, they will always need to be provided with a place to live, food and medical care as well.

  4. Likely there will always be at least a small group of chronically homeless that don't want to live in a traditional home or a shelter. Whether it's because of mental Illness or not I don't think you can force them to live somewhere if that's really not what they want to do.

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CaptainObvious110 t1_j93ldrs wrote

How many chronically homeless folks would you say are in Baltimore City? Also, what is the conditions of the shelter you have experience with? Percentagewise how many of those chronically homeless are due to severe chronic mental illnesses that realistically won't allow them to work even if medicated?

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sllewgh t1_j93mzfk wrote

>How many chronically homeless folks would you say are in Baltimore City?

I don't claim to have an accurate number.

>Also, what is the conditions of the shelter you have experience with?

I've been fortunate enough to not have to utilize city shelters. My knowledge comes from talking with dozens of people who have. No hot water, no hot food, no social distancing, no hand soap... a huge lack of basic needs. These conditions existed before the pandemic, but they got a lot worse. Three weeks into lockdown we were distributing masks at Our Daily Bread and the employees came out to get them, too. They said no one from the city had contacted them, they didn't have supplies, and we were the first ones to actually provide any help to them whatsoever in that time.

>Percentagewise how many of those chronically homeless are due to severe chronic mental illnesses that realistically won't allow them to work even if medicated?

I don't have that information. I doubt it's very high. I do know off the top of my head that the majority of homeless folks are employed, which indicates to me that low wages and poor housing affordability are significant systemic factors, and it's not just individual issues at play.

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CaptainObvious110 t1_j93smnr wrote

Ok, thanks so much! So let's say that 75% of the homeless population could be in a stable environment. That knocks things down quite a bit for people that need complete permanent help.

That's a lot of people that could be working and providing for themselves eventually. Not nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be

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sllewgh t1_j93unif wrote

Yeah, it's a common belief that most homeless folks are homeless because they have mental illness, drug addiction, or other issues besides a lack of housing. For sure these problems are much more prevalent in the homeless population than the general population, but as I said, systemic issues and housing affordability are huge factors. Fewer folks are aware of how many homeless people are working, but still unable to afford it.

The sort of widespread, visible, chronic homelessness we see today hasn't always existed in this country. Used to be that homelessness was something experienced by relatively few people and as a relatively short term problem. It really began to emerge in the 60s as public housing began to be dismantled. Since then, the HUD budget has been slashed by about 90%, and we've lost more units of public and subsidized housing than we currently have homeless people. There are many other factors as well, including the proliferation of addictive drugs in impoverished communities, the closing of sanitariums with no substitute, but the big one is that the market has failed to made housing affordable. We absolutely know how to solve this problem- we need to spend more money and make sure people have affordable housing, even if its not profitable to do so. There's just no political will to do it.

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CaptainObvious110 t1_j93vui5 wrote

It's very sad that there is money that could solve this problem but that it's not being used for that purpose.

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sllewgh t1_j93wg39 wrote

Agreed! Our system is cruel, it fails to meet people's needs, and it's in need of deep reform.

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CaptainObvious110 t1_j98rj1q wrote

Yes it does. It's annoying to me that people that have the ability to make changes keep talking about it but don't ever really solve the problem. You don't have to do any studies, we know what the problem is, we know why it's that way and we know how to fix it. All that's left is actually doing it.

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