Hard evidence? Nope. Maybe it's only 1%. Or maybe it's 20%. No one knows! My #1 frustration with the homeless crisis in Seattle is that we have almost zero dat

Hard evidence? Nope. Maybe it's only 1%. Or maybe it's 20%. No one knows! My #1 frustration with the homeless crisis in Seattle is that we have almost zero data. In fact almost all of our numbers on how many homeless are in the area come from the annual January one night count! It's absurd. How long have the homeless been homeless? When was their last home? Where was that home? How many times have they bounced into and out of homelessness? When was their last job? What was their job? Why did they become homeless? We honestly have no idea. Solving a problem is particularly different when you don't even know what they underlying source of the problem is! Now gathering this data is actually pretty difficult. Many homeless don't have formal id. And many others have a justifiable distrust of the government and organizations which make them not want to use their real names. In Seattle it gets even more complicated. Different groups don't like to share their numbers as to how many homeless they shelter or how many services they provide. Because if they all start sharing their numbers some of them are bound to start losing their funding. And we wouldn't dollars to be spent more efficiently by another organization now would we? So why is Seattle's homeless population so wildly disproportionate to our city size? <shrug> No one knows and we're just guessing.