Homelessness A Real Economic Indicator

People have been watching the stock market very closely over the last month, wondering every day whether the Dow Jones Industrials Average will go up or down. The Dow Jones, however, is an abstract representation of the value of an abstract share in a company.

Let’s get more concrete. Alongside the TV screen ticker that shows the value of the DJIA at the moment, I’d like to see another ticker that tracks the number of Americans who don’t have any home to live in.

As I’ve traveled to different American cities this year, I’ve made the anecdotal observation that I’m seeing a lot more homeless people living on the streets. My observations are backed up by the observations of people who deal with issues of homelessness across America.

There isn’t a reliable national measure of the number of Americans who don’t have any homes, but that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be. We have the census. We have birth certificates. We have school enrollment information. We have voter registrations. We have tax returns. We lots of sources of information from which to gather a sense of which Americans are living where.

The Bush Administration is already engaged in data mining and outright surveillance, electronic and physical, of peaceful, law-abiding Americans. They’re doing it to protect us from terrorism, they say, but terrorists threaten hardly anybody in the United States. Homelessness is a real and growing threat in most communities in all regions of our country, rural, suburban and urban.

I’m not suggesting that our government start spying on us to see where we live and what we’re doing there. However, if our government has the resources to listen in on our private conversations, surely it has the werewithal to track how many of us are living without any place to call home. Let’s track that real economic indicator, and use that as a measurement of the health of the economy, and not just worry about the way that the Dow bounces around from day to day.