Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 27, 1990 TAG: 9003270127
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In part, the effort was a response to long-standing criticism of the bureau for not trying hard enough to count those people, generally poor, who are hardest to count. In that, the special census of the homeless is cause for cheer.
But the count also reflected a gloomier aspect of the times: the rise of homelessness during the '80s as a visible feature of the American landscape.
The occasional eccentric, the Skid Row alcoholic: To an extent, the homeless have always been around.
But 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, the subway tunnels of New York City were not filled with homeless people.
Ten or 20 or 30 years ago, homeless people were not bedding down for the night on sidewalk grates in front of the nation's Capitol.
Ten or 20 or 30 years ago, social-service agencies in places such as Roanoke were not scrambling to expand their facilities for temporary shelter.
The count itself seems to have gone reasonably well. The census-takers almost surely didn't find every homeless person. But their work will be more credible than the estimates, which vary wildly, from people who have an interest in either minimizing or maximizing the problem.
Even the best of all possible counts, however, would be open to question and qualification.
A census is a snapshot, for example, and not a videotape: It provides a picture only of one instant in time. The number of homeless on the night of March 20-21 is smaller than the number of Americans who have been or will be homeless at some time during the year.
There also is a problem of definition. The Census Bureau sought to count people living either in temporary shelters or without shelter. But what about an adult or family that must reside with friends or relatives because other housing cannot be found?
Some advocates of the homeless prefer the broader definition. The more inclusive the definition, the greater the problem - and thus the more important their cause - comes to seem. But such inclusiveness runs the risk of trivializing homelessness: When inconvenience or difficulty is equated with a truly dire state, the dire no longer seems quite so bad.
And to the extent that broad definitions make homelessness appear all the more intractable, they are contributing to a growing public callousness toward the problem. Why worry about something that can't be remedied anyway?
The tragedy is that homelessness, at least to the degree in which it's now seen, can be remedied. It is not an inevitable byproduct of capitalism. If it were, why is it so much much worse today than a few years ago?
A host of indirect factors, ranging from rising health-care costs to drug abuse, contribute to the problem. But it essentially is the byproduct of two specific public-policy decisions of the '80s.
One (which actually dates to the 1970s) was the release of tens of thousands of patients from mental institutions, without adequate provision for community-based care afterward.
The other was a cutback in government-subsidized housing for the poor, a cutback worsened by the corruption now coming to light among top-level housing officials of the Reagan administration.
The census of the homeless is a step away from the mistakes of the '80s. By itself, it won't provide housing. But as some of the homeless themselves noted with approval, the census implied that they too are persons worthy of being counted. Ultimately, whether America remedies the problem may depend on whether America counts in the homeless or counts them out.
by CNB