From https://metaculus.com/questions/15651/nyc-homelessness-in-2023--100000/
The Department of Homeless Services (DHS) is a New York City agency dedicated to preventing homelessness, addressing street homelessness, providing temporary shelter, and connecting individuals to suitable housing through collaboration with not-for-profit partners. With an annual budget of over $2 billion and 2,000 employees, DHS aims help clients transition from shelters to self-sufficiency. The agency's critical objectives include preventing households from becoming homeless, reducing street homelessness, ensuring temporary shelter availability, increasing client engagement, maintaining shelter safety, and reducing shelter stays to promote stable community housing. According to the DHS data, NYC homeless individuals in shelter (run by the DHS) in 2022 ranged from 45,213 on January 1 to 66,334 on Dec 31. As of writing this question in late March 2023, the low for 2023 was 66,564 on Jan 1, with a high of 72,522 on March 28.
This increase in individuals using DHS homeless shelters has been acknowledged by the local government, which has promised to increase funding to homeless services.
The dramatic uptick last year was fueled, experts and officials say, by the ongoing financial impact of the pandemic, the end of statewide eviction protections last year, rising rents, understaffed government agencies, a shortage of truly affordable housing and the arrival since last spring of more than 40,000 asylum seekers from the southern border that lawmakers say has strained the city's resources.
In recent months, Mayor Adams has emphasized the uptick in migrants seeking shelter as the main force driving the city's homeless population, prompting the administration to open 74 emergency shelters in addition to the HERRC sites, including a short-lived, barracks-style tent facility on Randall's Island.
"We are now seeing more people arrive than we have ever seen—averaging over 400 people each day this last week, with 835 asylum seekers arriving on one single day alone, the largest single day arrival we’ve seen to date. All this is pushing New York City to the brink," the mayor said Saturday, as he prepared to travel to El Paso, Texas to meet with local leaders along the border firsthand. "We are at our breaking point."
1,000
3.00Someone is begging to reopen this and close on 31 December instead. Any insight why it closes early?
@Eliza The underlying Metaculus market closed Sep 30th and to support apples to apples comparisons between
the platforms, we try to match the timeframes during which forecasters can be active on these markets. I’m not sure how important that exactness still is to the Manifold and Metaculus teams so I’m fine leaving this open for now until we’re told otherwise.
@Eliza see for example https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/15359/predictive-performance-on-metaculus-vs-manifold-markets/#
See in “Methods” how additional work was required to ensure accurate analysis: “I restricted the analysis to the same time frame to avoid issues caused by a question opening earlier or remaining open longer on one of the two platforms. ”
Doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but for future analyses it would be best for all markets to match on both platforms.
@MetaculusBot In the comparisons I've worked on, I limit comparisons to the time when both questions were open. Note that often the Manifold mirror is created after the Metaculus question, so if you didn't do that you would have a wrong comparison already. So there's no particular need for close date to match up.