Years ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors commissioned a survey of the city’s residential landlords to gather information on their income and properties. According to the subsequent Survey Summary Report, only a fourth of those surveyed lived off rental income alone and most properties were small, four or fewer rental units each. In other words, most San Francisco landlords were small-fry with a side gig in rental property.

No surprise, tenant advocates were unhappy with this report. Basically, the picture it painted of San Francisco’s landlords was too sympathetic. Better rich and greedy than small-fries just trying to make ends meet. So tenant advocates made sure there would be no more landlord surveys. To quote the New York Times: “Since then, similar comprehensive research has been blocked, in part by tenants’ advocates who believe the findings would be “politicized” and become a referendum on rent control…”

Thing is, landlord surveys are a useful tool for evaluating the impact of tenant-protection policies. For example, surveys could tell us if rent control measures or new eviction constraints are followed by an exodus of small landlords or a change in how landlords vet prospective tenants. Survey findings could also provide useful data for tweaking existing policies, or even inspire major shifts in policy. Bottom line: you can’t get to good policy without good data.

Which brings me to the present day. Over the past week, I’ve read two opinion pieces in our local paper advancing the view that homeless shelters are more dangerous than homeless encampments, both articles based on interviews with a few campers. No hard numbers, no outside sources, no attempt to verify the stories of peace and harmony within the encampments or the rampant theft and violence in the shelters. Just they said so, so it must be true.

Now I accept that shelters can be dangerous - but more dangerous than encampments? Where’s the data? In an attempt to answer this question, I embarked on a several hour quest to find high-quality research on safety and crime in homeless encampments. Police incident or arrest data would have been helpful, as would surveys of encampment dwellers. Unfortunately, I could not find police data on criminal activity in encampments, possibly because police departments rarely include that type of data in their formal reports. The police may also ignore signs of criminal behavior in homeless communities, e.g., fights or piles of bike parts. And I couldn’t find a single survey that included questions about crime victimization in homeless encampments. The closest I came to any useful information was a Department of Justice monograph published in 2010. To quote:

“Not much is known about victimization among this population because they are not included in large-scale household-based surveys, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey. Official data, such as the National Incident-Based Reporting System and the Uniform Crime Reports, typically do not include victims’ housing status. Further, specific information on victimization of chronically homeless people who live in homeless encampments is based on case studies of particular jurisdictions or is anecdotal.” - Homeless Encampments  by Sharon Chamard

Why not include a few questions about crime victimization in the federal government’s Point-in-Time (PIT) count of the sheltered and unsheltered homeless? The PIT count takes place every couple years and includes several survey questions already, adding three or four more would not be a burden, either to the surveytakers or respondents. Plus, the information would be useful, both to inform policy and to gauge public safety trends. But would the feds ever include questions about victimization in the PIT count? Probably not, because the answers may very well confirm that encampments are dangerous places, which would provide ammunition to those who want to see them dismantled. And some rather powerful political groups would rather that not happen.

—

Reference:

Homeless Encampments (monograph) by Sharon Chamard. Problem-Specific Guides Series #56. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 2010.