If someone sat down to paint a portrait of the typical homeless person in Orange County, what might they draw?

Based on characteristics that emerge from the recently finished report on the 2017 Point In Time Count & Survey of the Homeless for Orange County, the face of homelessness staring out from our streets most likely looks like this:

He’s a white male, over the age of 25. He tends to live alone and is defined as “unsheltered” since he sleeps in some area not intended for human habitation — the concrete, a park, the river bed, bus stops, abandoned buildings, a car.

He would be among the 4,792 homeless people enumerated in a snapshot census undertaken early one morning in January.

He doesn’t have a child with him because, like most of Orange County’s homeless people, he is a single-adult household. He has a 1 in 10 chance of being a military veteran.

Like 91 percent of the homeless people willing to answer a question about chronic substance abuse as part of the survey, he will say drugs or alcohol don’t pose a problem for him. But there’s about a 12 percent chance he suffers from mental illness. Again, that’s according to what he is comfortable telling a stranger.

Jail or prison may not be that far behind in his rear view mirror, since nearly one-third of those surveyed said they had been incarcerated sometime in the past 12 months before the Point In Time count was taken.

Eight percent of those who answered the survey question about being released from incarceration over the past year said it had been a result of re-sentencing or a downgraded charge under Prop. 47, the reduced penalties initiative approved by California voters in 2014.

The 59-page document was produced by data analytics consultant Focus Strategies and represents a one-night sampling of homelessness in Orange County, where the federally mandated Point In Time count is conducted every other year.

The final report was quietly posted online at the end of August, several months after it was expected to be finished.

The delay was due to additional coordination needed between 2-1-1 Orange County, the nonprofit that oversees the Point In Time count, and increased county staff and departments now engaged in tackling homelessness, said Kristin Jefferson, 2-1-1’s director of collaborative engagement.

“It’s a new process because of the new folks that we have that are invested in the work, which is probably a good thing,” Jefferson said.

The county already submitted information from the count to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in April, a requirement tied to the millions of dollars HUD allocates for housing and other services for homeless people.

Those who work in finding solutions to alleviate homelessness say the Point in Time count is most useful as a sampling. It is generally considered to be an undercount but can be an indicator of where homelessness is heading.

“It’s trending information,” said Susan Price, the county’s director of care coordination and point person on homelessness. “It’s not information you can really use to take action on individual people.”

Still, the survey is the only such information that gives some picture of homelessness countywide. And this time around, 20 of the county’s 34 municipalities requested city-level reports that Jefferson said were scheduled to be delivered last week.

“We were really happy to see that so many cities were engaged and wanted to know the numbers,” she said. “You can’t solve something that you can’t quantify.”

The release of the final report is a bit of an anti-climax. A summary of key findings was made public in May and showed a 7.6 percent rise in the number of homeless people documented in Orange County since 2015, when the number was 4,452.

The number of homeless households went up 14 percent, the report shows, with the majority of those households adult-only: 2,689 men and 820 women.

The count documented 25 homeless children, whose families were “almost exclusively living in a sheltered situation,” according to the report. But a mini-census undertaken in May by a collaborative of local nonprofits identified 131 families with children who were homeless and had no place to go.



More than half of Orange County’s homeless people are living without shelter.

The Point In Time count found that the rise in homelessness here “primarily reflects an increase in the unsheltered population.” The sheltered population decreased by 2 percent while the unsheltered population rose by 17 percent, even as the county had opened The Courtyard shelter in October 2016 where close to 400 people a night sleep.

The report notes that this is “the first time since 2013 that the unsheltered population is greater than the sheltered population,” something 2-1-1 attributes to the phasing out of transitional housing projects as federal dollars shifted to permanent supportive housing, and a more thorough count of homeless people living on the streets.

The numbers in the Point In Time count come from the work of about 1,000 volunteers who fanned out around the county before the sun rose on Jan. 28, using maps of areas known to be inhabited by homeless people as their guide. Homeless people living in shelters were counted separately by service providers.

There were 221 valid surveys of unsheltered homeless people who were awake and willing to answer a series of 31 yes-or-no questions about such characteristics as military service, substance abuse, disabilities, and incarceration.

One gaping absence in the questionnaire part of the survey: the hundreds of people living along the Santa Ana River. The count at the river bed took place so early that no one was awake yet, Jefferson said. A team of people familiar with the river bed population canvassed the area by vehicle in order to cover its length, she added, an improvement over 2015 when 2-1-1 had to rely on volunteers on bicycles.

Overall, in conducting the Point In Time census, Jefferson said, “It’s always a balance of how to get out there early enough to get a good count and late enough when people are awake and willing to talk to you.”