Homeless Counts Start Up in Major Cities; D.C. Takes Estimate Approach

Prompted by a new funding incentive from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), hundreds of cities nationwide, including Washington, D.C., are engaged in an unprecedented effort to develop more complete counts of their homeless populations. 

For th3e last three years, cities have been required to report the number of people in shelters when applying for competitive HUD funds. These counts – called Point in Time assessments because data is collected on a single night – allow HUD to assess the capacity of area homeless facilities, said Brian Sullivan, a HUD spokesman. However, said Sullivan, these shelter censuses do not reflect unmet need – the number of people on the streets because facilities are full or because people refuse to seek shelter. 

Now HUD is requesting that every other year cities also tally the number of homeless living on the streets. The department is pushing cities to use uniform techniques to gather more complete data, encouraging every city to schedule its one-night street and shelter count during the last week in January and publishing a guide that recommends the best techniques for gathering and compiling information. The guide recommends that cities gather demographic information about their homeless, tracking variables such as gender, age, veteran status, and health condition. 

“We want to move away from anecdotal evidence and expert testimony and gather statically reliable data,” Sullivan said. 

The aim behind this expanded count is two-fold: to obtain more reliable information on the extent of homelessness in the United States, and to gain a clearer picture of the number of homeless people who do not seek shelter, a group more likely to comprise the “chronically homeless.” 

Current estimates say that the chronically homeless, those that stay on the street for more than a year at a time or are on the streets more than four times over the course of three years, constitute 10% to 20% of the U.S. homeless population, yet these individuals use more than half of the resources devoted to homeless people nationwide. 

“These counts will help us begin to learn what it is to experience long-term homelessness,” Sullivan said. 

Some homeless advocates, however, warn against reading too much into the data. Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said that one problem with a count is that many homeless people may not be in shelters or on the streets, but instead are staying with family and friends or “are doubled or tripled up in a motel somewhere.” 

“The basic situation is that it is impossible to get a scientific count,” he said. “There are always gross undercounts.” 

While acknowledging that the counts provide “only a snapshot” of the homelessness problem, Sullivan argues that HUD’S attempts to gather more comprehensive data are not idle exercises. “[These counts] are important, and not just for HUD,” Sullivan said. “They are critical to the way local as well as federal homeless programs operate and shape the way we target resources on the street.” 

With a record $1.2 billion in competitive HUD grant monies up for grabs in the next fiscal year, as many as 500 cities are expected to comply with HUD’s new request, tallying their unsheltered homeless in order to beef up federal grant applications. 

For some cities, this is the first time they will complete a comprehensive shelter-and-street census. San Francisco stopped tallying its homes in 2002, but did a new count in 2005. Los Angeles did a three-day census in late January, the city’s first-ever attempt at a citywide tally. And New York completed a homeless count in all five boroughs for the first time in 2005. 

Washington has more experience accounting for its homeless population. Service providers and outreach organizations in the metropolitan area have helped the city complete a homeless count every year since 2001, said Michael Ferrell, executive director of the Washington, D.C. Coalition for the Homeless. This annual count is coordinated by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and tracks the number of people living on the streets, in shelters and in transitional and supportive housing. 

Though “no one is naïve enough to think that we get everyone, or that we are 100% on the mark,” Ferrell said, the data produced help area service providers strategically plan outreach efforts. 

In 2001, the council counted 12,850 homeless people in the metropolitan area. In 2002, the figure rose to 13,982; in 2003, 14,276; and in 2004 14,537. 

Stephan Cleghorn, chairman of the Council of Governments committee on homelessness, noted that the District proper is home to between 7,000 and 8,000 homeless people who account for more than half of the regions homeless, with between 300 and 600 of them living on the streets. 

Unlike New York, D.C. does not rely on a volunteer corps to comb the streets. The last time D.C. mustered volunteers for a homeless street count was in 2000, to gather census data. Organizers of that event concluded that it didn’t work well, said Cleghorn. Volunteers had a hard time finding people, the count was unreliable, and the event took a disproportionate amount of scarce resources. 

“As important as [the street-dwelling homeless] are,” Cleghorn said, “They are a relatively small component of the entire homeless population in the District.” 

Instead, said Cleghorn, the council asks outreach organizations to estimate the number of people on the streets in their jurisdictions on a single night in late January. Between seven and nine organizations in D.C. provide these statistics. 

Gregory Hill, a street outreach worker at the drop-in center at Rachel’s Women’s Center in Northwest, works with roughly 11 people per day. But because he regularly canvasses a roughly 40-square-block area downtown, he’s also familiar with a far larger number of homeless who stay in certain parks or on particular corners. He adds their number to those he actually contacts in late January when calculation his street count data. 

The bigger, volunteer-based street sweeps done by cities such as New York seem like a good idea, said Hill, because the outreach workers asked to do street counts in D.C. often have other priorities. “If you see someone who needs the hypothermia van or medical care, you have to stick with that person,” he said. “You might not have time to count people or get very far [through the organizations jurisdiction]. 

 


Issues |Housing


Region |Washington DC

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