Nice Article on the Flaws of Point in Time Counts

The Institute on Children, Poverty and Homelessness have a nice article on their blog regarding the bad information distributed by HUD with their annual point in time counts.  We agree with this national agency, and do not participate in the local point in time count done by the County.  Our biggest issue is that both the media, national groups, and the federal government manipulates and distorts this data to dramatically underestimate the population.  They publish a report that has 20 pages of qualifiers about how bad the data is and how it cannot be translated to a yearly count, but in the end all that is lost when the information is tweeted to the public.  The ICPH correctly identifies many of the flaws with this data, the biggest problem is the dramatic undercount in families and the problems in not being able to recognize trends with a one day count.  We encourage people to bookmark their blog and check in with this group regularly.

Brian

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