Homeless numbers in Miami-Dade don’t add up.

We suspect the homeless situation in Miami-Dade is being mis-reported. Either that, or the number of transient registrants comprises more than half the homeless in the County.

Here’s why… The County is planning to build a transitional housing colony comprised of “tiny houses” on a barrier island in Biscayne Bay. The concept seems more glamorous than the reality, but for purposes of this post we are not as concerned about the concept as the numbers reported to the media.

In a quote to the local CBS 4 affiliate, the Chair of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust was quoted as saying, “We can end homelessness in this community in 24 months.” That’s a lofty claim considering the source is the same person who promised to deliver something similar more than a decade ago, but for purposes of this post we are more concerned with his stats than the exaggerated claim.

In that same article he claims that there are only 972 homeless in the community! That’s interesting because there are currently 488 transient people required to register as sex offenders in Miami-Dade. That 488 number is not a claim, that’s fact and taken from the FDLE data file. And, that number also excludes those who have absconded, are in custody or the five who are registered in Miami-Dade but also deceased. If the numbers were not being misreported, that would mean that more than half of the homeless are on the registry and subject to the County’s residency restriction.

Now we are not statisticians, but indulge our simple math for a moment… There are more than 20 million people living in the state of Florida. There are roughly 80,000 people on it’s sex offender registry. Even including the half that are not in the community, that’s roughly 4/10ths of 1% of the population. Now if more than half of the people experiencing a certain condition were also impacted by another factor that only affects 0.4% of the population, wouldn’t that be statistically significant?

Now we’re also not scientists, so excuse our naiveté, but if there were 1000 cases of a rare disease detected in a community and the one commonality that 500 of those infected had in common was they all attended the same wedding, wouldn’t someone look at this and question whether the disease can somehow be traced to that wedding? It should be obvious.

Either the Homeless Trust is grossly misrepresenting the numbers or they are intentionally concealing the most significant factor contributing to the problem.