Bush's Shameful Homelessness Legacy

by Shannon Moriarty

Published October 29, 2008 @ 11:45AM PT

Ross Douthat at the Atlantic wrote Monday about the Bush Administration's "success" in curtailing homelessness through Housing First (the latest approach to ending homelessness that I've described here). He lauds the success of Bush's initiative and asks the nagging question: will conservatives want to take credit for such a "radical" and "liberal" policy that has been (gasp!) successful?!

First of all, I wouldn't be so quick to laud Bush's homeless policies during his eight years in office. Sure, HUD claimed this past July that chronic homelessness plummeted thirty percent from 2005 to 2007. However, it has been widely reported that the methodology for counting homeless individuals changed during this period. Populations that had been counted previously - like people living on couches or in cars - were not longer considered "homeless" by the federal government, so they were no longer included in the count. 

In fact, HUD added several additional hoops for those compiling the data to hop through. According to BeyondChron:

Instead of the old method of letting the local counters determine if someone is homeless, HUD required that each homeless person be interviewed before being added to the list. Any homeless person who declined to be interviewed was not counted. Of course any homeless person not in the social service network also didn’t end up in the tally.

It seems to me, that when your methodology for counting homeless individuals is changed mid-study, you no longer have two similar sets of data. Therefore, comparing the 2005 count to the assessment taken in 2007 is like comparing apples to oranges.

Yet, these are the numbers the Bush Administration continues to use in support of their argument that chronic homelessness has fallen 30 percent under Dubya's watch.

To be clear, it's not that I don't think Housing First has been effective. Individual cities and counties have reported significant declines in their chronic homeless population since adopting this model. I simply ask that anytime someone cites a 30 percent drop in homelessness as a significant achievement of the Bush Administration, they include a large, bold asterisk. 

Furthermore, Bush's lack of policies and poor policies have resulted in significant increases in the overall homeless homeless population. Even bureaucrats are conflicted over their support for Bush's feigned "success" and the reality of our nation's homeless crisis. When we look beyond chronic homelessness - at men, women, children, families, disabled individuals, veterans, etc. - we see that this systemic issue has become significantly worse in the past year. 

So conservatives needn't worry about whether to take credit for Bush's alleged "success." When we consider the shifting methodology for counting the chronic homeless numbers and the numbers of homeless people growing right before our eyes, "success" probably won't be the word we use to decribe Bush's homeless legacy.