Homelessness - Rossi on poverty

Sociology 498: Homelessness

Average (median) incomes among the homeless

Rossi found that the monthly income for the average Chicago homeless person was $100. In inflation adjusted dollars for the year 2000, that would be about $151.

Medians are another type of average than means. Medians report the value for "average person" (in this case, the average homeless person). Half the sample of homeless persons had higher incomes, and half had lower incomes. Means report the arithmetic average of all incomes. As is typical for income data, the mean is higher than the median because of a few high incomes which bring the mean up. In this case, the pattern of medians shows the same pattern as for the means:

We make three comparisons:

To other national data to see how typical Rossi's Chicago results are.
To data on the non-homeless to see if the homeless are poorer than other Chicago residents.
To U.S. data on the formerly homeless to see whether poverty is associated with leaving homelessness.

Comparing Rossi's Chicago results with other homeless surveys

graph of median income for 4 homeless samples

As low as the Chicago homeless income was, it was slightly better than what Martha Burt and Barbara Cohen found in their national survey of urban homelessness a short time later. But the similarity of these results gives us confidence in their accuracy.

When Burt repeated a similar study a decade later, the income of the average central city homeless had increased by 90%, even after adjusting for inflation. The increase between 1987 and 1996 in income for the average homeless person suggests that homelessness has spread to a broader spectrum of the population over the decade.

The 1996 study also included the suburban and rural homeless whose incomes are somewhat higher than the central city homeless. Consequently, the total income of the average homeless person is somewhat higher than for the just the central city homeless.

The poverty - homelessness association

Obviously, the Chicago homeless incomes are low, but to see the association between poverty and homelessness, we need to compare the homeless incomes to incomes of other Chicagoans. If we want to conclude that poverty is a cause of homelessness, we need to know that the Chicago homeless are poorer than the Chicago non-homeless.

graph of median income for Chicago samples The Census data tell us, not surprisingly, that the Chicago homeless are much poorer than the average for all of Chicago.

The income for the average homeless person is much lower than for people who the Census Bureau classifies as poor (about 20% of all Chicago residents in 1990). However, if we restrict our focus to the extremely poor (people in families whose income is less than half of the official poverty line -- about 10% of the Chicago population), then the average homeless person in Chicago is doing better than the average person in Chicago who is extremely poor. In fact, the average homeless person has almost twice the income of the extremely poor. Nevertheless, almost all the extremely poor live in conventional dwellings. There must be additional explanations beyond mere poverty why the homeless are not adequately housed.

Rossi compares homeless incomes to the incomes of SRO residents. This is a particularly relevant comparison, since an SRO residence is just one step above homelessness -- both in terms of comfort and cost. Rossi found that the SRO resident income was more than three times homeless incomes.

Conclusion:

There is a clear association between poverty and homelessness. The incomes of the homeless resemble those of the extremely poor. They are well below the incomes of even the average poor person and below the incomes of those living in substandard, but conventional, dwellings. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that poverty is a cause of homelessness.

This is the same conclusion we reached for mean incomes.