Protecting her job...

HOMELESS HALVED
By JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN
WITHIN hours of last Wednesday's announce ment by the Department of Homeless Services that it had, over four years, cut New York's street homelessness nearly in half, the Coalition for the Homeless denounced the claim as false. "The numbers released by the city today defy credibility and run counter to what New Yorkers observe every day on New York's streets," said executive director Mary Brosnahan. "Do New Yorkers really think there are half as many homeless people on our streets as four years ago?"
Well, I do. I walk the streets of New York every day, take the subway and buses, and use city parks. To the naked eye there certainly seem to be far fewer street guys on the West Side, in Midtown, and in the Village - three of the prime "homeless habitat" areas. The West Side's most notorious street resident, George, who lived variously on the steps of West-Park Presbyterian Church, the benches of the Broadway mall, and the playground of an Amsterdam Avenue public housing project, is now installed in an apartment in the Bronx. In 2009, says DHS, Manhattan has 777 street homeless people, down 57 percent from 2005's 1,805, and down 38 percent from last year's 1,263. These numbers seem roughly correct.
My trust is partly anecdotal, of course. But then so is Brosnahan's challenge, which is in the tradition of the bad old days when advocates and city officials argued bitterly about the extent of the problem - advocates asserting it was apocalyptic and officials saying it was under control.
The Bloomberg administration, on the other hand, believes in data - in trying to determine the extent of the problem city government is expected to solve. In 2003, Bloomberg initiated the first one-night annual count of "unsheltered" New Yorkers - the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate - in Manhattan only. In 2005, it expanded the survey to the other four boroughs, making it citywide, including the subways.
And while street homelessness for "surface areas," meaning land, was found to be down 62 percent since 2005, the number of individuals living in subway stations and trains is up by 15 percent - a sobering statistic, given the MTA's planned service cutbacks.
Administered by more than 2,000 volunteers, the HOPE survey is accurate, argues Rosanne Haggerty, the president of Common Ground, a developer of supportive housing. "These are our neighbors who do this," says Haggerty, "not DHS employees who have a dog in the fight to make the numbers look low. This is a completely transparent process by which New Yorkers actually do the count, from midnight until 4:00 a.m., on one January night."
The Coalition seems to be suggesting that many street homeless people are simply not counted. But Prof. Steve Burghardt of the Hunter College School of Social Work, one of the survey's designers, says that's unlikely. To provide a check on reliability, HOPE sends out almost 200 pairs of "decoys" into "randomized areas of the city." More than 80 percent of the decoys were found by the volunteers, validating the methodology, says Burghardt.
Philip Mangano, executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, scoffs at the Coalition's contention that homelessness is getting worse, saying there's no question but that chronic homelessness is going down in New York. "New York has the three attributes that make a difference," says Mangano, "the political will of Mayor Bloomberg, a strategic plan derived from evidence-based, field-tested ideas, and more resources invested in the innovations necessary to get the job done."
HOPE's kind of rigorous investigation and analysis of a serious social problem should take the public conversation on street homelessness to a new level. Instead we seem to get charges and counter-charges.
Since hundreds of millions of dollars is spent on homelessness every year, the stakes are high - both for homeless individuals and the groups that seek to minister to them. If the number of street homelessness is truly declining, then decreasing financial support for groups like the Coalition for the Homeless is likely to follow.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.