What's Behind the Numbers? Definitional Issues in Counting the Homeless

Housing Policy Debate

Volumn 2, Issue 3, 1991, Pages 585-616

  Cordray, David S ^a   Pion, Georgine M ^a  

^a VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972914548     PISSN: 10511482     EISSN: 2152050X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10511482.1991.9521065     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Shelter-type institutions. These include homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, subsidized temporary hotels/motels/apartments, and runaway and homeless youth centers.
2. Non-shelter institutions. In this category are jails, mental health facilities, detoxification centers, and quarter-way, half-way, and three-quarters-way houses.
3. “Gray area institutions. These include single-room-occupancy dwellings, hotels that are paid with the individual's own resources (e.g., YMCAs and residential hotels with long-term occupants), and transitional/permanent housing projects (e.g., group homes and arrangements targeted at the “once homeless”).
4. Long-standing institutions. This group includes hospitals housing boarder babies, facilities designed to shelter victims of natural disasters, and housing facilities for other emergency situations (e.g., facilities for abused and neglected children).
5. Nonresidential institutions. This category is different from the previous settings in that it does not include sleeping arrangements, but rather service settings specifically targeted at homeless individuals: soup kitchens, mobile food vans, drop-in centers, and health clinics.
6. Noninstitutional locations. These are nonconventional dwellings, including streets, parks, transportation depots, abandoned buildings, parked cars, sections of highways (e.g., underpasses), public transportation (e.g., subways), parking garages, and railroad boxcars.
7. Conventional dwelling units. The focus here is on identifying those individuals who are “doubled” up or otherwise precariously housed.
8. Martha R. Burt and Barbara E. Cohen, Feeding the Homeless: Does the Prepared Meals Provision Help? (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute 1988); Carl F. Horowitz, “Mitch Snyder's Phony Numbers: The Fiction of Three Million Homeless,” Policy Review 49 (1989): 66-69; Peter H. Rossi, Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
9. Mary E. Hombs and Mitch Snyder, Homelessness in America: A Forced March to Nowhere (Washington, DC: Community for Creative Non-Violence, 1983).
10. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 53.
11. U.S. General Accounting Office, Homeless Mentally III: Problems and Options in Estimating the Numbers and Trends, GAO/PEMD-88-24 (Washington, DC: 1988).
12. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 54.
13. Anna Kondratas, “Estimates and Public Policy: The Politics of Numbers,” this journal.
14. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, A Report to the Secretary on the Homeless and Emergency Shelters (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 1984).
15. William Tucker, “Where Do the Homeless Come From?” National Review, September 25, 1987, 32–43.
16. Richard B. Freeman and Brian Hall, Permanent Homelessness in America? Working Paper No. 2013 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1986).
17. National Alliance to End Homelessness, Housing and Homelessness: A Report of the National Alliance to End Homelessness (Washington, DC: National Alliance to End Homelessness, 1988).
18. U.S. General Accounting Office, Children and Youths: About 68,000 Homeless and 186,000 in Shared Housing at Any Given Time, GAO/PEMD-89-14 (Washington, DC: 1989).
19. U.S. Conference of Mayors, The Continued Growth of Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty in America's Cities: A 25-City Survey (Washington, DC: U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1986).
20. Martha R. Burt and Barbara S. Cohen, America's Homeless: Numbers, Characteristics, and Programs That Serve Them (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 1989).
21. Martha R. Burt, “Developing the Estimate of 500,000-600,000 Homeless People in the United States in 1987,” in Conference Proceedings for Enumerating Homeless Persons: Methods and Data Needs, ed. Cynthia M. Taeuber (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1991).
22. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 81. Although no specific dates were provided by Rossi, we assume that he refers to the year just prior to the publication of his book.
23. Hombs and Snyder, Homelessness in America.
24. Peter H. Rossi, Gene A. Fisher, and Georgiana Willis, The Condition of the Homeless in Chicago (Amherst, MA, and Chicago: Social and Demographic Research Institute and National Opinion Research Center, 1986).
25. Michael Sosin, Paul Colson, and Susan Grossman, Homelessness in Chicago: Poverty and Pathology, Social Institutions, and Social Change (Chicago: Chicago Community Trust, 1988).
26. Rossi, Down and Out in America; U.S. General Accounting Office, Homeless Mentally III.
27. Brent B. Benda and Patrick Dattalo, “Homelessness: Consequence of a Crisis or a Long-Term Process?” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 39 (1988): 884-86
28. Charles Hoch, “A Brief History of the Homeless Problem in the United States,” in The Homeless in Contemporary Society, ed. Richard D. Bingham, Roy E. Green, and Sammie B. White (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987); Sosin, Colson, and Grossman, Homeless in Chicago.
29. David S. Cordray, “Counting the Homeless: What Counts?” in Conference Proceedings for Enumerating Homeless Persons: Methods and Data Needs, ed. Cynthia M. Taeuber (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1991); Rossi, Down and Out in America.
30. Kim Hopper, “Homelessness Old and New: The Matter of Definitions,” this journal. Hopper provides a nice account of the historical changes in definitions of homelessness. He takes a social constructionist perspective on problem definition, also pointing out cultural differences in defining terms such as conventional dwelling.
31. Cordray, “Counting the Homeless.”
32. Howard H. Goldman, Antoinette A. Gattozzi, and Carl A. Taube, “Defining and Counting the Chronically Mentally 111,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 32 (1981): 21–27.
33. Scott M. Monroe and Anne D. Simons, “Diathesis-Stress Theories in the Context of Life Stress Research: Implications for the Depressive Disorders,” Psychological Bulletin (in press).
34. Cynthia M. Taeuber and Paul M. Siegel, “Counting the Nation's Homeless Population in the 1990 Census,” in Conference Proceedings for Enumerating Homeless Persons: Methods and Data Needs, ed. Cynthia M. Taeuber (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1991).
35. Johnson, “Measurement and Methodology”; James D. Wright, Address Unknown: The Homeless in America (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989).
36. Taeuber and Siegel, “Counting the Nation's Homeless Population,” 93.
37. John Darnton, “Alone and Homeless, ‘Shutouts’ of Society Sleep in Doorways,” New York Times, October 25, 1975; Robin Herman, “New York City Resists State on Shelters for Homeless,” New York Times, October 11, 1980; Janet Clayton, “Police Close Down Makeshift Home for Skid Row Residents,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1985.
38. Bob Drogin, “Typhoon Dims a Philippine Bright Spot,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1985.
39. Mark I. Pinsky, “A New Class of Homeless on the Horizon,” New York Times, March 27, 1985; Kirsten Downey, “Renters Called Vulnerable in Downtown,” Washington Post, December 29, 1990.
40. As noted by Rossi in his comments on this paper, the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of home also is saturated with references to family, intimacy, acceptance, and other feelings of social support. In contrast, current definitions of homelessness contain no such allusions. This is a shift from definitions held by social scientists prior to 1980, in which homelessness often was equated with familylessness and spouselessness.
41. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), “Instructions for Form 1040A” (Washington, DC: IRS, 1990).
42. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 10.
43. David Dreier, “What Does ‘Homelessness’ Really Mean” (Letter to the editor), Washington Post, May 10, 1990.
44. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Cooperative Agreements for Research Demonstration Projects on Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Treatment for Homeless Persons (Washington, DC: NIAAA and NIDA, 1989).
45. Burt and Cohen, Feeding the Homeless; Sosin, Colson, and Grossman, Homelessness in Chicago.
46. A small-scale study that also supports the ways in which definitional criteria affect the number of individuals viewed as homeless was conducted by James Morrison, “Correlations Between Definitions of the Homeless Mentally 111 Population,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 40 (1989): 952–54.
47. Burt and Cohen, Feeding the Homeless; Sosin, Colson, and Grossman, Homelessness in Chicago.
48. The 1990 Annual Report of the Interagency Council on the Homeless (Washington, DC: Interagency Council on the Homeless, 1991).
49. Martha R. Burt and Cynthia M. Taeuber, “Overview of Seven Studies,” in Conference Proceedings for Enumerating Homeless Persons: Methods and Data Needs, ed. Cynthia M. Taeuber (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1990).
50. Rossi, Fisher, and Willis, “The Condition of the Homeless.”
51. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 11.
52. U.S. General Accounting Office, Children and Youths, 31.
53. Sosin, Colson, and Grossman, Homelessness in Chicago.
54. Jose M. Santiago, et al., “Defining the homeless mentally ill: A methodological note,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 39 (1988): 712–19.
55. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 11.
56. Hombs and Snyder, Homelessness in America.
57. Rossi, Down and Out in America.
58. Taeuber and Siegel, “Counting the Nation's Homeless”; Michael L. Dennis, “Changing the Conventional Rules: Surveying Homeless People in Nonconventional Locations,” this journal; Franklin J. James, “Counting Homeless Persons With Surveys of Users of Services for the Homeless,” this journal.
59. Dennis, “Changing the Conventional Rules.”
60. Taeuber and Siegel, “Counting the Nation's Homeless.”
61. U.S. General Accounting Office, Children and Youths.
62. Institute of Medicine, Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988).
63. U.S. General Accounting Office, Children and Youths, 31.
64. This estimate is based on information in Burt and Cohen's Feeding the Homeless. Additional information is contained in a memorandum from the Urban Institute to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and information obtained in a telephone conversation with an Urban Institute researcher.
65. Rossi, Down and Out in America, 53.