I found a news article on CNN today that relates perfectly to what we have been discussing in class for the past week. This article discusses some of the problems encountered during the P.I.T. (Point-in-Time) count of Camden County, New Jersey. Camden is the poorest city in the U.S. and has an unemployment rate of 13%. Yet last year’s P.I.T. count found only “589 homeless people in the 513,000-person county.” This makes it the perfect example of an area with a very understated homeless count.

As we’ve seen throughout this past week, there are many problems with the current system of P.I.T. counting. P.I.T. counts takes place within a 24-hour period in the last week of January at least every other year. These counts are required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for each county, but they are not funded by the government. There’s the first problem –  without proper funding, of course we are not going to get an accurate count. Furthermore, as the homeless in the CNN video repeated many times, homeless people often don’t want to be seen. There are many places that probably go unchecked by counters simply because they can’t see them. There are plenty of homeless sleeping in cars, couchsurfing, living in abandoned buildings or “tent cities,”and hopping back and forth from the street to various family members’ homes. All of these people fit HUD’s description of homeless. Yet they most often are not being counted in the “homeless census.”

Obviously, it is close to impossible to get a completely accurate count of homeless, since the numbers change from day to day as it is. But as shown by this article and the other data we have seen this week, there is a great importance in improving the P.I.T. count. The homeless are being under-counted and therefore misrepresented. These counts determine how much federal aid is given to the shelter systems, so they directly affect the people being misrepresented.