Examining the Relationship of the President and the Homeless Rate
By: Brandon Roten
Tags: Politics

Recently, I came across an article that claimed that the homeless rate is going to increase in the coming years blaming President Trump and Republicans as the cause. Below is a link to the article for reference:

In this article, I will examine the relationship that the homeless rate has along with who the president is at the time. When thinking about this relationship, I also thought about some of the other factors that may be in play such as social events and environmental changes. To begin, I wanted to initially examine just the president and homeless rate. The first dataset I worked with was from the National Alliance to End Homelessness (pictured below).

From here, I took the overall homeless total since 2007 and compared it to the Presidents over the same time span. Here is what the results looked like from this examination:

The first thing to point out from this visualization is that there has been a general decline in the homeless total since 2007, until a slight increase in 2017 and 2018. Based on this data we can also see that there is a possibility there is a relationship with who the president and possibly what their political party is because we can see that since Obama took office in 2010, the homeless rate continued to drop until recently when Trump took over as president. In addition to this examination, I began to think about the possibility of economic factors because back in 2007–2008, the U.S. was experiencing some of its worst economic time. In order to take a closer look at this, I compared the homeless rate to the unemployment rate. I was able to get this data on the rate of change from The World Bank. Here is a visual to show the unemployment rate since 2007:

When examining this graph, we can see initially that there is a similar rate of change to that of the homeless rate, meaning we are seeing a downward trend in recent years. I also think it is fair to say that there is a clear and apparent relationship with this rate of unemployment and the amount of homeless people. We can also see that like in the homeless data, the year that the decline began was in 2010 when Obama took office as president. This rate of change in unemployment rate helps make the argument that economic factors such as employment play just as much of a role if not more than who the president is. These could also be somewhat related due to different laws and regulations that are passed over the years by different members of the government. It is also important to note that the unemployment rate has not yet risen since Trump has taken office, meaning that there are still other factors at play that could increase the homeless rate. When thinking about other factors that could increase the homeless rate, I began to think about environmental factors such as natural disasters or just other weather and temperature changes that could change the amount of homeless people in the U.S. In order to examine this trend, I examined as dataset that was collected from the International Disaster Database. Below is the result of the amount of natural disasters since 2007:

Based on this graph, we can see that there is a downward trend, but with some fluctuation. This is not surprising because obviously sometimes nature in unpredictable and can change at a moment’s notice. With that in mind, I would state that there is also a relationship with the amount of natural disasters and the amount of homeless people. In addition, we see a large increase in disasters in 2010, and this is seen in the unemployment rate and the homeless total. Something else of note is that there is a slight increase in disasters in 2018 and this reflects in the slight increase as homeless rate as well, and after examining the previous data, I believe that this is a reason that contributed to the change.

Overall, I would say that who the president is, the unemployment rate, and natural disasters all play a role in the amount of homeless people from year to year in the U.S. Another key finding was that all three data points in 2010 were unusually high, meaning it could be argued that Obama stepped into the toughest job of the three examined. After stating that, I would also say that the original article that led me to write this piece is both correct and incorrect. Who the president is clearly effects the homeless rate, but there are also other factors that need to be considered.