Comments on: UC Davis in the (local) news

By: swong

swong — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:29:17 +0000

Or the journalists fudged the term, mixing up “homeless” and “living below the poverty line” or something. I only see the word “homeless” mentioned once in that first paragraph.

An article on thousands of kids attending school by day and sleeping under overpasses at night in a major American city would surely be Pulitzer-worthy material. Most of the article is about impoverished families and poor student achievement.

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:08:07 +0000

So there’s a 1.5 million people in greater LV. About 1% of the US population experiences homelessness in a year and less than 1/4 of that is homeless at any given time. LV, then, has about 15,000 people experience homelessness per year and about 4,000 at any given time. A third of homeless are children (presumably most of these are going to public school), so there’s 5,000 and 1,300 homeless children in LV (depending on how you count) if LV looks like the rest of the country demographically.

The article made it sound like it was talking about homeless-right-now children, i.e. the 1,300 number which is much smaller than the article’s 4,000 figure. This suggests LV is either 3 times poorer (more total homeless) or 3 times younger (more homeless children) or some combination of the two than the rest of the country.

These data are from wikipedia which also reports the poverty level in LV is less than the national average. There doesn’t appear to be an outsized number of children either (which was my prior). So basically, this means I’m calling bullshit on that statistic…

By: swong

swong — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:02:38 +0000

Hm, the number doesn't seem so implausible when considering how big the school district is. ~310,000 students... $3 billion annual budget! Dayum!

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:31:15 +0000

That may be. I think of sleeping outside as being homeless, but maybe they count those kids (and families) that are staying at a relatives house, or something.

I don’t know where to find homelessness data.

By: swong

swong — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:32:35 +0000

Or maybe they’re using a different definition for “homeless” than you would expect.