Faulty Definition Leaves Millions "Out of the Homeless Force"

Statistics, when accurate, are both telling and powerful. We cannot help a population of people whose needs and crises we do not understand. However, statistics are open to manipulation. For example, the federal unemployment rate is not an enumeration of all people who are out of work. Instead, the unemployment rate only counts people who actively sought work in the last four weeks. People who are not looking for work because they have become discouraged due to multiple failed attempts at employment are simply considered "out of the labor force," and not included in unemployment statistics.

I recently wrote about the Housing and Urban Development's duplicitous definition of homelessness that does not include people living in motels and with friends and families due to economic hardship. While these people are clearly homeless by any reasonable understanding of the word, their exclusion from HUD's definition and the precarious trend of misleading statistics that underrepresent the true extent of deprivation in the United States, such as our misguided poverty measures, undermines our ability to make significant progress on social issues.

Statistics construct our understanding of truth, both when accurate or otherwise, especially when those statistics come from the federal government. While chronic street homelessness is a serious issue, and the aspect that springs to most people's minds at the mention of the word "homeless," it is a subset of the homeless population. The mainstream understanding of homelessness excludes the millions of adults, and especially children, who are left out of HUD's definition. While you can argue that the federal government offers a reasonable, more inclusive definition of homelessness through the McKinney-Vento Act, the predominant understanding of homelessness, as evidenced by media portrayals thereof, is HUD's limited definition of the word.

The idea of a work-able person, discouraged by countless rejections from employers as being "out of the labor force" is absurd. Obviously, discouraged workers are unemployed persons. Equally ridiculous is not counting people as homeless who live in motels and in cramped double and triple-occupied apartments. That is no way to live, and such living arrangements are especially damaging to the future prospects of homeless youths.

Nevertheless, HUD, and consequently the general public, simply ignores this sizable portion of the homeless population. Tell HUD to get its definition of homelessness in line with reality.

Of course, perhaps HUD's definitional exile makes sense. Like those discouraged workers who are "out of the labor force," maybe those living in motels or with friends and families are simply unworthy of enumeration. Indeed, why don't we just call those people who are clearly homeless but uncounted by such an inanely inaccurate definition what they truly are, out of the "homeless force."

Photo credit: SpecialKRB