Undercounting of The Homeless
This year, the New York City Department of Homeless Services is conducting its eighth annual HOPE street homelessness survey. And once again, there is mounting evidence that the City’s survey and its resulting “estimate” fail to measure homelessness accurately and mislead the general public about the scale of the problem. In 2004, after the City initial trial HOPE surveys (conducted only in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island), Coalition for the Homeless released the report Undercounting the Homeless, which detailed the various ways that the City’s survey has an inherently flawed methodology and how it fails to capture large numbers of unsheltered homeless New Yorkers.
