That's the latest challenge for state and city information technology staffs, following last month's reauthorization of the federal Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. As our reporter Trudy Walsh points out in this month's cover story, the latest version reduces federal assistance to the homeless from last year's authorization and earmarks a small portion for information systems to track the homeless. Simply counting the homeless is a near-impossible task. Survey results differ by order of magnitude in their estimates of homeless populations.
Counts often reflect the counters' political leanings.
Whatever the actual numbers, people do move in and out of the homeless condition. Delivering services is therefore highly problematic compared with other welfare programs whose recipients have addresses and phone numbers. Exacerbating the counting difficulty is the fact that some homeless people want to be left alone. Questioning such people to enter their statistics into a tracking database might push them further from social services' reach. Beyond that, municipalities and other government entities attempting to create tracking systems for the homeless need to ask themselves just how much effort is enough when there are other pressing needs such as welfare recipient tracking and limited budgets.