Tracking and Counting Homeless People
In the USA, the federal government's HUD agency has required federally funded organizations to use a computer tracking system for homeless people and their statistics, called HMIS (Homeless Management Information System). There has been some opposition to this kind of tracking by privacy advocacy groups, such as EPIC. However, HUD considers its reporting techniques to be reasonably accurate for homeless in shelters and programs in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.
Actually determining and counting the number of homeless is very difficult in general due to their lifestyle habits. There are so-called "hidden homeless" out of sight of the normal population and perhaps staying on private property.
Various countries, states, and cities have come up with differing means and techniques to calculate an approximate count. For example, a one night "homeless census count", called a point-in-time (PIT) count, usually held in the early Winter, for the year, is a technique used by a number of American cities, especially Boston, Massachusetts. Los Angeles, California uses a mixed set of techniques for counting, including the PIT street count. In 2003, The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had begun requiring a PIT count in all "Continuum of Care" communities which required them to report the count of people, housing status, and geographic locations of individuals counted. Some communities will give sub-population information to the PIT, such as information on veterans, youth, and elderly individuals as done in Boston.
Read more about this topic: Homelessness
Famous quotes containing the words tracking, counting, homeless and/or people:
“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)
“Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders’ cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Most people are much too preoccupied with themselves to be malicious.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)