My hands-on experience gathering homelessness data in NYC

What I learned as a volunteer counting America’s homeless in Brooklyn, and how reliable that data is

I write a lot about data and what it tells us about the state of inequality in America. However, we only occasionally dig into how that data gets captured in the first place. 

People tend to trust data. They believe that numbers are objective and that they tell us a quantitative story about the state of the world. But I had the experience of actually gat…