Housing Insecurity — Trends and Ramification analysis
Despite massive strides in housing development over the past decades, New York still faces significant challenges with housing. An average of almost 60,000 individuals spend the night in the New York City homeless shelter system not including the thousands who sleep on the street each night. This analysis answers a few key questions using publicly available data:
- What are the key areas in the dialogue about homelessness?
- How is homelessness experienced by different demographics? (Source: Department of Homeless Services Daily Report)
- What is the correlation between eviction rates and homelessness? (Evictions Data NYC Open Data)
What are the key areas in the dialogue about homelessness
There are heaps of dialogue about homelessness on the web. Studies by APA break down causes and effects of homelessness, many universities allocate resources to understanding the crisis. Despite this, Wikipedia offers a very comprehensive view of homelessness combining data from various sources.
A few words stick out on this wordcloud — mental (referring to mental health), student, youth. It is clear that specific demographics experience housing insecurity differently.
Who is affected by homelessness?
There is growing discourse about the causes and effects of housing insecurity. It is apparent that children who experience housing insecurity early in their lives experience long term effects from missing school, trauma, and the unfortunate abuse that is prevalent within the system. The NYC Homeless Shelter provides a daily report about the residents which breaks down as follows:
This data shows that the average number of individuals processed through the NYC Homeless Shelter system each month is 1.7 million individuals. This is far too high. Worse still is the reality that the trend has not been downward sloping over the last 7 years — the housing crisis has remained the same since the end of the financial crisis. A demographic who arguable experiences housing insecurity is children — the data shows that despite steady occupancy rates, the number of children in shelters is declining.
The average number of children staying in homeless shelters each month from 2013 to 2020 is ~653,000 which is roughly 35% of total occupancy. It is interesting to note that after the Covid-19 pandemic began, the number of children in homeless shelters begins to decrease with the notable exception of July and August 2020. According to a teacher I spoke to, the decrease might be due to students being forced and assisted to find permanent or semi-permanent housing in order to access school resources, including daily meals. According to them, the other explanation would be that a rise in evictions was pushing students out of homeless shelters. A look at the eviction data posted on New York Open Data shows a stable distribution in number of evictions, with an average of 83 evictions each day, due to legislation passed to prevent surges from the pandemic.
The randomness of this distribution is not in line with the decline in children experiencing homelessness (this is a gross over-simplification).
What is the conclusion from this research?
This research is elementary but shows that there is a decline in the number of children residing in homeless shelters, which is an important subset of individuals facing housing insecurity. The decline was particularly steep after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. There appears not to be any relationship with evictions. Going forward, I would recommend a second look at the data after herd immunity is achieved and schools re-open. Should there be a rise in children in shelters, it would be important to re-assess the role in-person schooling plays in the housing crisis.
