The Count: The Quantification of Needy Populations in Late Modernity

• In Event: Displaced Populations of Late Capitalism

Abstract

Each year, cities in the United States receive funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to provide shelter and other resources to the homeless. In order to receive federal funding, communities are required to conduct a Point-in-Time (PIT) counton a single given night each year. PIT count data, on sheltered and unsheltered individuals, are reported and used to calculate a “count of homeless individuals found in shelters, transitional housing, and public spaces” in order to allocate government funding (HUD 2014). Though a HUD requirement, state and local level organizations partake in the production and use this quantification of a human social problem in order to measure success in combatting homelessness. However, situated in late capitalism, this practice of counting the homeless is merely “to satisfy a cultural practice of quantification within American social policy” (Jocoy 2013:397). This study reflects on the cultural practice of quantifying homelessness as a means to defining, addressing, and evaluating the current political campaign to end homelessness across the U.S. The results of this study will provide an advocacy for change of the normalized, legitimized, yet failed practice of “counting” as a way to address the causes and solutions to homelessness.

Author

• Lindsey Upton, Old Dominion University