They dressed in several layers of clothing or donned old hats. They carried blankets and cardboard boxes. It was approaching midnight in New York one night in March 2005, and recruits who had been paid $100 each to pretend to be homeless were fanning out across the city.



There were 58 sites dotted throughout the metropolis. Pseudo-homeless people arrived at subway stations in Manhattan, back alleys in Staten Island and Queens, the front steps of a church in the Bronx.

Then they waited to see if anyone noticed them.



The actors were taking part in a peculiar experiment led by Kim Hopper, a researcher then at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. The purpose: to analyze the effectiveness of the city’s count of homeless people.

Hopper and his colleagues found that actors at almost one in three of the sites reported being missed by counters. And these were people who wanted to be counted. They did not include the swaths of genuinely homeless ensconced in corners of the city. “Invisibility serves the purpose of security and uninterrupted sleep,” the researchers noted.

Just over a decade later, questions remain about the reliability of America’s biennial street count of homeless people, an extraordinary undertaking in which thousands of volunteers head out into the darkness in cities, forests and deserts around the country.

It still takes place mostly at night, relying on volunteers who are often equipped with nothing more sophisticated than clipboards, pencils and flashlights.

But supporters of the count, which is run by local communities in return for federal dollars and may be the largest tally of homeless people in the world, argue that it is a crucial mechanism to keep track of people who often exist outside of government bureaucracy.

Even if the figures are open to question, they provide a window into the landscape of America’s homelessness problem – and a sense of how it is changing over time.

“The bottom line is that it’s imperfect, but I don’t know that we could do a better job,” said Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and a principal investigator on the homelessness reports that are presented to Congress annually.

The most recent report found that on one night there were 549,928 homeless people in America.

That figure has gradually declined across the nation over the past decade, although homelessness appears particularly entrenched in western states. Of the 10 states with the highest rates of homelessness, seven are in the western half of the country.

Today the Guardian launches Outside in America, a year-long series focusing on the people and places scrambling to cope with a homelessness crisis across the west.

One in five homeless Americans live in California, where the problem is especially acute. In the Golden State and three other western states – Hawaii, Nevada and Oregon – more than 50% of homeless people are categorized as unsheltered, meaning they are living in the streets, vehicles or parks, in places not fit for humans to stay. In New York, by comparison, the number is less than 5%.

City services are overwhelmed. After torrential rains in San Francisco last week, the shelter wait list for single adults reached a record 1,126 people, according to Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.

“We have this emergence of a very visible and very large homeless population in the shadow of tremendous affluence,” she said. “As folks are forced to remain on the streets for longer and longer, they’re really disintegrating. They’re developing more severe mental illnesses and more severe medical disorders, and losing limbs and in wheelchairs.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Homeless people sleep in the pews at St Boniface Catholic Church as part of the Gubbio Project in San Francisco. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The homelessness problem appears especially severe in cities in the grip of soaring real estate markets. Places such as Seattle and Portland have declared states of emergency to deal with the crisis as they would a natural disaster, while the Los Angeles area, where 43,854 people were counted last year, has the largest number of homeless people in the region.

The 4,000-square-mile count that covers most of LA County is the nation’s largest. It includes one of the most concentrated communities of unsheltered homeless people in the country: Skid Row.

During this year’s count, Skid Row volunteers were forced to walk in the middle of the road as the sidewalks were blocked by jumbles of tents and lean-tos. People lay prone in sleeping bags, with cardboard boxes over their heads for a modicum of privacy.

“Four! Five! Six!” announced one of the counters, the numbers mounting almost without cease.

A barefoot woman in a bathrobe was bent over and scraping at the ground under a lamppost with her walking stick. A grizzled man almost ran into the volunteers and trilled “uh oh”.

“You’ll see a whole lot of that,” said Lydell Londo, a formerly homeless man who struggled with a drug addiction and lived on Skid Row for about a year and a half and had joined the counters. “A whole lot of craziness.”

The shimmering skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles loomed overhead, but on Skid Row many of the grimy buildings were dark. All the life was on the streets.

Counting homeless people here is disconcertingly easy; volunteers estimated they had tallied about 275 homeless people in only eight square blocks.

The idea of carrying out a national count emerged at the same time as the modern incarnation of American homelessness: the early 1980s. The country was in a recession, mental healthcare was in the midst of a decades-long process of being deinstitutionalized, and cuts by Ronald Reagan weakened the safety net – the budget for low-income housing assistance was cut in half during his first year in office.

The government created a new homelessness program within the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “We put it in an emergency agency and we gave it an emergency-sounding name,” said Mark Johnston, who administered homelessness programs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for 25 years. A few years later, “we realized that this is not an economic blip of a recession in the Reagan era. This thing has roots. It’s going to stay around.”

At the time, some activists opposed the idea of counting homeless people, arguing that doing so would inevitably produce an inaccurately low number, enabling policymakers to cut back on services. In 1990, homelessness advocates dumped sand outside the US Department of Commerce and placed signs reading, “Counting the homeless is like counting grains of sand.”

Despite criticisms, the outdoor counts prevailed and gradually became an enduring event taking place in the last 10 days of January across the country every other year.

In addition to tallying people living on the streets, organizers also include those who are in emergency shelters or temporary housing.

But counting homeless people outside of places such as Skid Row can be complicated. During this year’s count in Hawaii – the state with the highest per-capita rate of homelessness in America – volunteers fanned out across the islands to count homeless residents.



Its homeless population has soared 30% since 2007 in tandem with real estate prices – what some call the “paradise premium”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A volunteer interviews Charles and Raini Day Nippell, who say they recently arrived to the islands but are having medical difficulties, during the homeless count in Honolulu. Photograph: Liz Barney/The Guardian

At Waikiki Beach, Honolulu’s arc of white sand, social worker Colleen Nakamura watched as a man with matted gray hair passed by on the promenade, clutching a bulging grocery bag. Did it contain a recent purchase – or his worldly belongings? She made a judgment call. “No,” she mouthed to another volunteer.



That call – rightly or wrongly – will mean one less person on Hawaii’s count for 2017.

Another person who will be left off the tally is Chris Kauffman, 39, who sat in a gray minivan filled with bags of his possessions and surfboards on the outskirts of the neighborhood when he saw the volunteers walk past. He has been living in his vehicle for two years because he was unable to afford rent. He wouldn’t mind answering the survey, he said, but nobody had asked him. “I’m pretty smart,” he said softly. “I know where to sleep so the police don’t bother me.”

“I’ve never been of the opinion that the count is even close to the complete number of those who experience homelessness on a particular night,” said James Wright, a homelessness expert at the University of Central Florida who was a leader of the count in Orlando for about seven years. “It always gives me a chuckle when HUD” – the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which publishes the data – “reports it to six significant digits. It’s real misplaced precision.”

But Culhane, the University of Pennsylvania academic who aggregates the vast set of data, said federal officials are aware their figures provide only a snapshot. While the count identifies around half a million homeless Americans on a given night, Culhane uses data extrapolations to estimate that some 2 million Americans experience homelessness at some point over the course of a year.

For one in three, it lasts a week or less; for others it will be much longer.

Some advocates take a more expansive view and define the many people who are “doubled up”, unable to afford their own place to live and making do by sharing space with friends or family, as homeless.

Others say such people are merely “at risk” of homelessness. Either way, according to the US Census Bureau, this was 7 million people in poor households in 2014.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two airmen investigate tracks in the snow during the homeless count in Anchorage in the early morning hours. Photograph: Ash Adams/The Guardian

Estimating the number of homeless Americans is by definition a fraught exercise. Doing so in winter, when many homeless people are huddled for warmth under freeway underpasses or inside cars, poses a particular problem.

It is especially challenging in Alaska, which has one of the largest per-capita homeless populations in the country, concentrated in Anchorage. More than 400 people in Alaska were unsheltered, in sub-Arctic weather, according to last year’s count.

About 5am one recent morning, volunteers including six air force airmen set out on foot along an unlit bike trail through a large forested area in the south-west of the city.

With flashlights they scanned for foot trails in the fresh snow that might lead to homeless camps. Given the temperature was just below 30F (-1C), they were also prepared to discover something worse.

Deceased homeless people have been discovered during expeditions such as these. Weeks later, spring snowmelt in Alaska has also been known to reveal the frozen bodies.

“When we have these big cold snaps like we did this winter, it’s not unheard of,” said Monica Stoesser, a social services worker who led the group. “It’s the reality of what sleeping in tents is like in Anchorage.”

The airmen waded through thigh-deep snow to an old camp, which was unoccupied. Next the volunteers came upon a well-traveled trail that wound into the spruce forest. At the end were two tents, both covered with tarps.

“Hello?” Stoesser called out. “Is there anybody home?’ There was no answer.

Additional reporting by Dan Hernandez in Las Vegas

This story was updated to remove an erroneous estimate of the number of unsheltered homeless people in Anchorage.