The countless homeless - homeless advocate Mitch Snyder and census of homeless

National Review, April 16, 1990

MITCH SNYDER, Washington's foremost "homeless advocate," is in fact a first-class tantrum artist whose tactics-from hunger strikes to the organized disruption of traffic-rarely fail to win him publicity.

Snyder's latest stratagem is to refuse to cooperate with the 1990 census, on the grounds that it will "undercount" the homeless. He contends that the Census Bureau uses inadequate techniques for detecting his elusive constituency.

The obvious solution would seem to be for Snyder to put the word out on the streets that all homeless people should see that their existence is recorded. It's not as if the government doesn't want to count them. But of course they are Accredited Victims, and Snyder won't concede that they have any duty to help the government help them.

We have a hunch that what's really eating Snyder is the justified suspicion that the census will deflate his own hyperbolic estimates of the homeless population. Various studies suggest that the real figure is a small fraction of the Snyder figure. So he's trying to discredit the government in advance, at the risk of alienating some of his own well-wishers, who can't figure out why he's doing this.

Our own fear is that the census will seriously undercount the number of con men in this country. Snyder affects to be opposing the system, when in fact he's working it for all it's worth. The political ecology of the welfare state rewards calculated disaffection with cash, services, power, and of course publicity. As Benjamin Ginsberg of Cornell University has explained in his book The Captive Public, the state now generates the demand for its own benefits, thereby expanding its power. That's why Snyder won't be punished for his antics. He's a valued client.