Friday, October 4, 2019

Counting homeless people

How do you count homeless people?

This article confidently informs us that "Lansing/East Lansing/Ingham County CoC has 471 homeless individuals, including 54 homeless veterans and 29 homeless unaccompanied youth under 25."

This article more humbly estimates a range for US homelessness as being between 250,000 and 3,000,000. That is quite a range, from 0.08% to 1% of the population.

One must wonder if the authors of the first article took the census numbers for the Lansing Metro region and multiplied by 1%.

Incidentally, the official definition of "Homeless" is:
An individual who lacks housing, including one whose primary residence during the night is a supervised public or private facility that provides temporary living accommodations; an individual who is a resident in transitional housing; or an individual who has as a primary residence a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.
It is not my intention to make fun of homelessness. My intention is to point out sloppy thinking and attempts at manipulation. 

3 comments:

  1. I lived in my 30'travel trailer for about 4 years. I had a bed, a bathroom, a couch and cooking/eating area. I had a truck that worked, I was comfortable, fed and warm yet the state I lived in considered me "homeless" and counted me as that. I am truly disabled and I did not have any problems with my living situation yet the social services kept pushing me to subsidized housing that I refused. My space rent was far cheaper then what would have I have paid in a subsidized apartment. I was safe, and happy, yet that damn do-gooders weren't.

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    Replies
    1. One of the guys in town was "homeless". He had a trailer in a friend's backyard.

      He also had three dogs and the housing authorities would not allow them in the apartments they found. He stayed in the trailer. The dogs had stuck with him when many of his friends abandoned him.

      We also had a "homeless" woman in town. She had a place where she could stay but not if she did drugs. Guess which was more important to her?

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  2. Being "homeless", when it's by your own decision, or even if it's something you decide to accommodate rather than fight, doesn't have to be a big negative in your life. If you think about it, for much of humanity's history many if most have been homeless by our definition.

    If you want to see how to be homeless and happy, watch the CheapRVLiving channel on YouTube. Interesting and informative.

    I'm already gaming out how this might work in my and Mrs. Freeholder's life if necessary. I will not be a burden to my kids or society in general.

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