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This appears to be the case when it comes to tracking the prevalence of homelessness among young people in America, according to recent reports from two federal departments.
A tally from the Department of Education, released in January, showed that more than 1.5 million students enrolled in public schools nationwide were homeless during the 2017-18 academic year, a 15% increase over the 2015-16 school year. It was the highest number ever recorded — and the largest share of the overall public school student population in at least a decade.
In December, however, numbers released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development appeared to suggest the opposite. Not only did they indicate that there were many fewer homeless children in the country, but they also showed a yearslong decline in the number of children living with families — to 107,301 in 2018 from 122,901 in 2015.
Both sets of numbers shape local decisions about housing, public health and transportation, and help determine which communities receive crucial federal assistance. Advocates for the homeless say this is becoming increasingly consequential amid a nationwide housing crisis and as the coronavirus outbreak has closed schools and disrupted lives across the globe.
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They said the diverging trends, however, risked sowing confusion about the extent of the problem and how it is tracked, undermining a meaningful response. They outlined a number of factors to explain the differences between the data sets, including misaligned definitions of homelessness, unique methodologies and the particular difficulty of finding homeless families.
Some officials said that each set of numbers serves a unique purpose and that the two should not be conflated. But in many cases, advocates said, officials and the news media pick one set of data to publicize local trends or to evaluate programs to address homelessness, which can present a misleading picture of the problem.
“Is what we’re doing to address homelessness working or not working?” said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on youth homelessness. “We’re assessing public policy based on metrics that are telling very, very, very different stories.”
Homelessness has been associated with people sleeping on sidewalks or park benches, but youth homelessness is typically less visible, Duffield said. Young people could be living with their families in cars or shelters, or moving from one friend’s couch to another.
Many are living in hotels. It has been more than a month since April Goode, 39, moved with her four children into a room in a Quality Inn sandwiched between two highways in Ledgewood, New Jersey. Her two older girls, ages 14 and 12, share one of the room’s two full beds. The two younger children — a girl, 10, and a boy, 9 — sleep in the other. Goode sleeps on the floor.
With state assistance, Goode and her family now live in the hotel. There is no kitchen, so Goode bought a small crockpot. The windows don’t open. There are no parks nearby, so on the weekends, Goode takes her children to a nearby animal shelter to play with the cats and dogs.
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The children, whom she uprooted to New Jersey from Florida in the dead of winter after she separated from her husband, are growing frustrated, she said.
One of her daughters wakes up in the middle of the night every night. Her son’s school said he needed glasses, but Goode cannot afford the car ride to the eye doctor.
Goode said she recently started seeing a therapist.
These issues and anxieties have only been amplified by the coronavirus outbreak. Homeless people are among the most vulnerable; many are living in cramped shelters, and aid groups have started scaling back services to limit exposure to the virus.
After the schools in Chatham, New Jersey, shut down because of the outbreak, Goode said the family was essentially stuck in their hotel room.
She said she was worried about her children “losing their drive.”
“Why does it matter, if there’s nothing to look forward to?” she said. “I just don’t have any answers for them. It’s really, really hard not to feel hopeless, when you can’t see a way out.”
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Different Numbers, Different Stories
The consequences of housing instability can stretch far beyond childhood. It has been linked to heightened risks for substance abuse, suicide and sexual exploitation, and a greater likelihood of becoming homeless in adulthood, according to a SchoolHouse Connection analysis.
“If we want to tackle the more visible adult homelessness,” Duffield said, “we have to have the right metrics and measures of children and youth homelessness.”
The best measures, however, come from HUD and the Education Department, and each data set routinely appears to support different conclusions.
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The most obvious difference in the two sets of numbers is scale. The Education Department’s 2017-18 count is more than 10 times larger than the 2017 and 2018 HUD counts, largely because of differences in methodology and how each department defines homelessness.
Students who are staying, or “doubling up,” with friends, relatives or other people account for the largest share — nearly 75% — of the school numbers.
While research typically shows that the doubled-up population faces many of the same dangers and risks as other homeless people, HUD does not count them, Duffield said.
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In the Education Department’s methodology, if a student is identified as homeless at any point during the school year, even for one night, he or she is counted. HUD, on the other hand, relies on a “point in time” count. Every January, teams fan out across the United States to see how many homeless people they can find in one 24-hour period.
The overall result is that the public school count consistently identifies a much bigger population while many advocates for the homeless dismiss the HUD number as a substantial undercount.
Still, officials in Boston, San Francisco and Seattle have all used the HUD numbers to describe trends in homelessness.
“The HUD numbers are seen as official numbers,” Duffield said. “They are what mayors pay attention to. I think they are what private philanthropy pays attention to. I think the HUD numbers drive policy. I think that’s tragic.”
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Some local officials see value in both numbers. In 2019, officials in the District of Columbia cited the HUD count when they announced that the number of families experiencing homelessness was down almost 12% from the previous year and had decreased by more than 45% from 2016 to 2019. The Education Department data, however, showed that 7,445 students were homeless in the 2017-18 school year, an increase of nearly 19% over the same period two years earlier.
Laura G. Zeilinger, the director of the city’s Department of Human Services, said the decrease reflected in the HUD count was evidence that programs to help people experiencing “rare, brief and nonrecurring” homelessness were working.
She acknowledged that the Education Department’s numbers showed evidence of persistent housing instability. But she said that count captured a broader problem than the type of homelessness addressed by the HUD count.
“If we measured everybody who is in a doubled-up situation,” she said, “that’s almost the same as, ‘We’re going to measure poverty, and unless you solve poverty, we have not solved homelessness.’”
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Even the public school count can be limited, Duffield said. Students can be reluctant to divulge their housing situation because of stigma or fear. An audit by the state of California in November, for example, found that public school districts had significantly undercounted the number of homeless students.
Robert Marbut, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, said it was important to remember that each set of data measures something different. HUD is a snapshot in time that counts all homeless people, not just children. The public school data, he said, tracked instability over a year and was a better representation of homelessness among young people.
“One’s a Polaroid, one’s a video,” he said.
A HUD spokesperson said in an email that “the differences in the data each agency collects and how they compile it helps them serve their respective missions.”
“HUD encourages use of data from both agencies to assess the housing needs of communities in the United States,” the spokesperson added.
A spokesman for the Education Department said in a statement that while its data showed a steady increase over the years, it was “unable to attribute this increase with certainty to a specific cause.”
“The increase may be a result of an increase in the prevalence of homelessness among children and youth, and/or improved school-level practices of the identification of students experiencing homelessness,” the spokesman said.
Counts Drive Services
For communities nationwide, the measurement is more than informative, said Casey Gordon, chair of the Grand Rapids Area Coalition to End Homelessness. The group runs HUD-funded programs in Western Michigan, where Gordon said suburban poverty and a lack of affordable housing regularly keep people from finding stable homes.
People who are designated as homeless by HUD are eligible for special services, such as access to HUD-funded shelters. When schools identify students as homeless, they try to connect them with shelters, school counselors and other services, she said.
The numbers help determine how much federal money the Grand Rapids area gets. And, inevitably, the counts are different.
The 2019 HUD count found 218 homeless children under the age of 18 in the Grand Rapids area. Gordon, who is also the homeless education coordinator for the Kent Intermediate School District, said schools identified some 2,500 homeless students in the 2018-19 school year.
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The differences in the numbers has become a source of frustration for some members of Congress from both parties.
Reps. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, and Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, introduced a bill in April that would “expand HUD’s definition of ‘homeless’ to include all children and youth who are already verified as homeless by several other educational and social services programs.”
“We should have homogenized definitions that match in the two different departments,” Stivers said. “You shouldn’t define things differently just because you’re in a different agency.”
“The bottom line,” he added, “is if you don’t count somebody as homeless, you can’t get them help.”
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HUD and Education Department officials did not answer questions about the possible reconciliation of the definitions.
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Marbut, who joined the Interagency Council on Homelessness in December, said he needed more information before deciding whether aligning the definitions made sense. He noted that about a decade ago, there were even more definitions of homelessness.
“Whatever happens there or not,” he said, “there’s an absolute need to understand the difference between these measures and metrics, because they tell you two different things, that’s true.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .