Homeless Shelters: Biased Unsurprisingly, Biased in Ways Unexpected

Earlier in the school year I researched homelessness and the quality of homeless shelters online sources. Although these countless articles, anecdotes, reviews, and more were beyond helpful as a starting point, they yielded only a limited point of view into the life of someone staying in a homeless shelter. The conclusion I came to after conducting this research was that, as one would expect,  shelters are in pretty bad condition. An extremely easy way to see this would be, surprisingly, through Google Reviews. This was great for my research since it showed first hand experiences, both good and bad from a variety of people and locations. With this in mind I decided to set up an online survey for those who have stayed in a homeless shelter to fill out. This would let me see for myself whether the data I had previously collected was true.

One of my main focus points is trying to understand if race or sexual/gender identity played a part in the mistreatment of the people staying in shelters. This was, coincidentally, one of the greyest areas in any of the articles I read. One thing I commonly found while sifting through reviews were claims that white men were commonly being mistreated the most. I found this to be a bit… strange because of, well, literally everywhere else white men have privilege. So to combat the unclarity of this issue I just asked homeless people myself. For my original research I made a survey on google forms about homeless shelters and race/gender dynamics in said shelters.

I posted this survey to three subreddits. r/Philadelphia, the Philadelphia subreddit, r/Homeless whose name is self explanatory, and r/SampleSize, which is a community made for taking surveys and collecting poll data. Although I submitted to all three of these and received a mere 12 responses out of the 377 views I got some pretty grounding data. Among the 12 responses homeless shelters are biased against LGBT+ folks, even going as far as to “out” them to others staying in the shelters. Aside from that, the allegations of biases against white men were true (at least so far as to the responses I collected). Multiple of the survey takers stated that since there were few white men they were often targeted for theft (a common problem in shelters) and were less likely to have their belongings returned in a theft. I have included some of the responses in the picture below. (Here) is a link to the survey and it’s entire responses