Why Do We Count and Survey

Homeless People?

(by Joe Colletti, PhD)

For more than 200 years most people in the United States have tried to avoid homeless people. So why is there an increasing interest in counting and surveying homeless persons during the past decade? Since 2003, the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has required local homeless continuum of care systems to count homeless individuals and families during the last 10 days of January in order to receive HUD grant funds. In addition, HUD requires the gathering of information about homeless subpopulations that include the chronically homeless, persons with HIV/AIDS, persons with mental illness, unaccompanied youth under age 18, substance abusers, veterans, and victims of domestic violence. As a result, nearly 500 systems of care throughout the United States count and survey homeless persons within their jurisdictions with the help of thousands of local volunteers.

These activities have helped reverse a centuries old trend of avoiding people who have been termed with a variety of names that connoted aversion and avoidance. During the colonial era "vagrants" and the "wandering poor" were expressions used to describe persons without a home. Vagrants were avoided because they were social outcasts and the wandering poor were avoided not only because they were social outcasts but because they begged for money. Right after the Civil War, tramps and bums were two words used to describe people without a home. Tramps would often ignore the public as they travelled from place to place and seemed to like to sleep outdoors. When they interacted with the public they did so primarily because they wanted a short-term job for some handy money. Bums were known as people who lived in the same outdoor area day after day and begged for money. As a result, avoiding the area in which bums lived was easier than avoiding the person. Read More...