Good morning.

Today, we’re starting with a dispatch from my colleague Thomas Fuller, who’s based in the Bay Area:

Many cities across California this year announced sharp increases in homelessness. Yet data from San Francisco suggest the real picture might be a lot worse.

For years, city governments have measured homelessness by sending out volunteers on a single night to count, as best they could, the number of homeless people they found on the streets or in shelters. By this method San Francisco this year reported 8,011 homeless people, a 17 percent increase over 2017, the last time a count was conducted.

[Read more about why homeless populations in cities around the state have surged.]

But San Francisco has another, arguably more comprehensive, way of measuring homelessness, and the results are even more alarming.

Over the course of a full year, the city counted twice as many homeless people — 17,595 people, a 30 percent jump from the previous year.