A homeless veteran protests to passers-by on trendy Venice Beach, California.
What’s the point-in-time count in your particular district? Conveniently, whatever it suits you to say it is. That’s one possible answer to a necessarily haphazard, volunteer-rich process of lifting the lid on every dumpster and peering into every likely thicket on one particular day/night of searching for people who are experiencing homelessness.
Where might such a cynical answer come from? Well, one possibility is California’s grand festival of community-helpless homelessness, in particular the trendy Los Angeles enclave of Venice.
It has been triggered by a Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) spreadsheet that breaks down homelessness by every census tract in the County.
The air is thick with activist astonishment. A stroll in the streets or along the beaches of Venice allow any passer-by to see people who are homeless. Yet the spreadsheet says Venice has no people who are homeless.
If, as the LAHSA robustly defends, the count is basically accurate, it would seem to call into question either the reliability of point-in-time count procedures, or the ease with which these procedures can be manipulated to produce desired results.
Read more at msn: LA homeless count raises doubts about accuracy. Is it time for a new way?