Who was counted? NYC continues to misrepresent street homelessness survey results

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio trumpeted a decline in street homelessness Thursday, but failed to note that the one-night survey he cited only counts a limited subset of the larger street homeless population – an oversight the city has repeated for the last decade.

According to a city press release, the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) count found “2,794 homeless individuals were living on the streets of New York City in February 2016, 12 percent fewer than last year.” The statement did not clarify that the count’s methodology is not designed to tally all “homeless individuals,” but rather “chronically homeless” individuals. These are people whom the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as having lived on the street for at least a year, or many times in one year, and can be diagnosed with drug abuse, serious mental illness, brain damage or other serious chronic physical illnesses or disabilities.

The discrepancy can affect formulas that are used to determine the amount of funding available to nonprofits servicing homeless individuals, which can obfuscate efforts to adequately address the problem. New York Nonprofit Media raised the issue with Department of Homeless Services last December.

When asked this week why the city had continued to misrepresent the HOPE count, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services said he would investigate.

Shortly after the mayor’s announcement, some nonprofit homeless advocates and services providers rejected the reported decline in street homelessness as absurd.

“Nobody who has spent more than thirty seconds walking through the city would believe that street homelessness has declined in the past year – let alone by double digits,” a statement by Coalition for the Homeless President and CEO Mary Brosnahan said. “It simply defies credibility.”

“This number is wrong,” said Jarquay Abdullah, a leader at Picture the Homeless. “I know it had to be wrong because everybody didn’t get counted.” Abdullah participated in the count two months ago, volunteering to act as a “decoy” homeless person – a method used to help determine the margin of error for the count. He said he saw volunteers steer clear of dark corners and leave certain homeless people undisturbed, and heard from several unsheltered homeless people who similarly said they were never counted – having slept in hospitals during the freezing weather.

NYN Media previously reported that nonprofit homeless services providers – and even those who helped craft the count – said a flawed methodology and misleading public statements have contributed to a longstanding misconception that the street homelessness problem is less serious than it truly is.

“Any rational person would agree that sending volunteers out on a single, bitterly cold night in the dead of winter and attempting to count the heads of those who appear homeless is a preposterous way to accurately gauge the magnitude of the problem,” Brosnahan said in her statement.

Benjamin Charvat, who oversees all analytics and data for DHS, previously told NYN Media that the count is not a measure of all homeless individuals living on the street – and it was never intended to be.

Last December, NYN Media interviewed Kim Hopper, a professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who helped design the HOPE count. Hopper explained that the count was only ever meant to measure a limited subset of the homeless population – the most “recalcitrant” individuals.

“You have this minimalist count which is designed to get at those people who are most resistant to coming indoors,” Hopper said. Accordingly, the count is purposely taken during one of the coldest nights of the winter. Hopper explained that in the worst weather, many street homeless are able to find a warmer place out of sight of the teams of volunteer HOPE surveyors.

Street homeless individuals often have fluid living arrangements, spending the night wherever they can find shelter, advocates say. Cold or rainy nights might be spent in a hospital, whereas other nights might be spent in an abandoned building, and others in a car. Most often, it is only when a person has nowhere left to go that they curl up on the pavement outside.

For these and other reasons, Hopper said, to “transform (the HOPE count numbers) into an accurate assessment of how many people spend some time on the street during the course of a year would be a mistake.”

However, critics say that that is exactly what the city has done, by portraying the HOPE count as a comprehensive survey of all homeless people living on the city’s streets.

For the last decade, press releases and presentations by DHS publicizing the results of the HOPE survey have not explained the limitations of the count. A presentation of the 2015 results simply said the count intends to determine “the number of people living unsheltered across the city.”

Last December, DHS officials insisted that they always clarify that their HUD-certified count estimates only a particular slice of the city’s street homeless population.

“I can pretty much confirm with certainty that we always use the word, ‘chronic,’” press secretary Nicole Cueto said at the time. After NYN Media read the press releases back to her, Cueto backpedaled, promising the department would “review the issue.”

But in a familiar pattern on Thursday, the city’s press release did not use “chronic” to describe the subset of street homeless people counted, nor did it use any other language to communicate the limitations of the count.

NYN Media asked the Department of Social Services whether the city believed it was accurately representing the street homeless population by continuing to omit any mention of the count’s limitations in its public statements. A spokesperson assured NYN Media that the department was investigating the issue.

Columbia’s Hopper said this week that although the flu kept him from participating in the 2016 HOPE count for the first time in a decade, his personal observations Thursday night contradicted the city’s report.

“It felt very much like a return to early 1980s,” Hopper wrote. In lower midtown he “saw people bedded down on well-lit major thoroughfares, crammed into store alcoves on 34th Street across the street from Macy's (in couples, no less), and scattered on church steps."

As for the city’s declaration of a 12 percent decline in street homelessness, the early architect of the HOPE count added, it is “plainly counterintuitive to suggest a decline.”

This article was first published on New York Nonprofit Media on April 29.

Click here to read a letter to the editor from David Neustadt, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Social Services.