How many homeless people are in New York City?
It depends very much on what you mean by “homeless”. If you mean the people living on the street, they are actually a very small part of the problem (but the most obvious and the most difficult to solve.) There are many, many more people who have no housing, who are in the “shelter system”. There are different kinds of shelters – shelters for single men, shelters for single women, shelters for families, shelters for the elderly, etc. The City does not always deal with the people in the shelter system very well, and they make up the bulk of the population you will see listed on the statistics of “homeless people in NYC.” They are not living on the streets. However, they might be spending multiple nights in offices, waiting for a shelter space to open up. Families frequently have to pull their children out of school to present them to social services officials, to prove that they are still homeless, and have children, to maintain their place in a shelter. And the shelters themselves are
