Fatal Flaw In Point-in-time Homeless Counts?

A white bearded veteran holds up a sign while protesting among the palms of Venice Beach.
Homeless photo by Juan Felipe Rubio is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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 procedures1, or the ease with which these procedures can be manipulated to produce desired results2.

Read more at msn: LA homeless count raises doubts about accuracy. Is it time for a new way?

Footnotes

  1. The activists are interested in shifting to a Built For Zero counting system. For more on Built For Zero, try: Ending Homelessness: Learning By Doing and Homelessness: What Is Functional Zero, And Why Does It Matter?
  2. For an example of this from the United Kingdom, try: UK COVID Homeless Miscount. A Convenient Funding Dodge?