A national survey released Wednesday tagging Colorado with the nation’s third-highest rate of homelessness is based on 2-year-old data since proved inaccurate, local advocates for the homeless say.
That means the state is actually better off and isn’t the homeless haven the study suggests, advocates say.
The report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness said the U.S. homeless populace in January 2005 was more than 744,000 people and 44 percent of them are on the streets.
It put Colorado’s homeless number at 21,730, 0.47 percent of the state’s population, third per capita behind Rhode Island and California.
But the study’s Colorado numbers are faulty because in 2005, they were based partly on estimates, not hard counts as occur now, officials say.
“Some numbers were based on anecdotal evidence, and that’s always difficult to use in any reliable manner,” said John Parvensky, director of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, which participates in the counts.
The NAEH report was derived from federal grant applications in 2005 by private and public agencies that banded together to form continuums.
There are 463 continuums nationally, three of them in Colorado.
But the first statewide survey in 18 years occurred last summer, and 12,000 homeless people were counted.
That number included metro Denver, which on its own tallied a winter count of about 9,000 homeless people in January 2006.
Experts say a statewide winter count should be closer to about 15,000, 0.32 percent of Colorado’s population, and would have placed the state 13th on the study’s list.
“That assumes all the other states’ numbers are accurate too,” Parvensky said.
Staff writer David Migoya can be reached at 303-954-1506 or dmigoya@denverpost.com.
