By Josh Brokaw

Every year, sometime in January, a handful of volunteers spend the night traipsing Tompkins County with the goal of turning names into numbers.

The names are those of homeless people. The numbers are required by the federal government.

In a place the size of Ithaca, the names and locations of local outdoorspeople are often well-known to those doing the survey. Many of the volunteers who do the “point-in-time” count every year already work with people who spend much of their time on the street.

Making people into numbers is an annual, necessary evil that the Department of Housing and Urban Development demands. In Washington, it seems, statistics are a useful thing to have laying around when making decisions about how to fund local agencies that shelter the homeless.

The numbers from a one-night count are imperfect, as most anyone with a rudimentary statistical understanding could guess.

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“If you had looked into my front window last night, you would’ve seen my two daughters get their homework done early and go to bed relatively on time,” said Rich Bennett, director of the Ithaca Rescue Mission, at the April 5 Homeless & Housing Task Force meeting. “That is not an accurate depiction of what my house always looks like.”

Happenings on the street are more unpredictable than most any house. Weather is a complicating issue, particularly since the feds require the point-in-time count happen on one night of a selected week in January. When this reporter rode along with an Ithaca police officer on the morning of January 24 as a survey volunteer, the overnight snow was laying crystalline in the treetops and slushy on the ground. Spots where sometimes a person can be found sleeping rough were empty: No one was at the sheltered spots in parking garages, in big box store doorways, in a copse of trees on South Hill. Two hours of cruising yielded no one to ask the survey questions. First, Where are you sleeping tonight? And then – will you share your age, race, benefit status, have you have been homeless before? Why?

Finding no one leads to strange language games with one’s self. Returning to the Rescue Mission afterwards, you say “Well, we struck out,” and then realize you are saying, in essence, “We didn’t find anyone in rough enough shape to be sleeping outside in the snow,” and feel bad. It’s akin to “liking” a facebook post about bad news.

While the incentive to “do well” at the point-in-time count is unclear – even the most experienced service agency director couldn’t tell you whether HUD uses its purse strings to discipline for a higher count or reward for a lower one – coordinators JR Clairborne and Tierra Labrada have made a good faith effort the past two years to expand the survey’s reach. The Continuum of Care, the countywide group that applies for and administers federal funding for homelessness, had a sub-committee work on the survey all year. Two IPD officers offered ride-alongs all night this year, and volunteers attended a training in how to give the surveys. [Rule number one is don’t wake up someone who’s sleeping.] Loaves & Fishes also had the survey available for guests all week, and the shelters and transitional housing providers report how many people they have staying there that night.

For all its flaws, the point-in-time survey does serve as one more night for people who do care about the homeless to show that they care. Backpacks with food and blankets and other supplies were handed to survey volunteers to distribute to anyone they found. At the April 5 meeting where this year’s numbers were revealed, Clairborne explained the debriefing process that happened at the Rescue Mission:

“There was a conversation of ‘Who did we get? Who’s missing? And we’d start calling names. Someone would say ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about, and we’d start describing them, and then everyone would know who we were talking about. There’s talk about homeless people being invisible people. But there are people who know exactly who they are, people in this community who say people do matter.”

Hopefully, if you have read through to this point, you now understand how complex and imperfect the point-in-time survey results are and will always be, and you will use the following numbers carefully. Please do not rely on these numbers to make assertions like “Ithaca has more homeless people than Syracuse” because five years of point-in-time numbers show nine more unsheltered people, total, in Ithaca as in Syracuse (as the Voice did in a story last year).

Besides those in the street, the survey total also includes those in shelters, transitional housing, or put up in hotels by the Department of Social Services for the night. Onondaga and Oswego counties had a total point-in-time count of 597 people homeless in 2016 with those included; Tompkins County had a total of about 105.

The Tompkins County continuum of care attempts to count those who are “imminently homeless,” with evictions scheduled in two weeks or less, or “unstably housed,” people who are couchsurfing. It’s very hard to find those people, and so they are likely well undercounted. It’s also likely that because of the focus on the streets and shelters, single men are overrepresented in the survey – women and children are couchsurfing or doubling up with friends or family.

Open Doors, the Family & Children Services program that helps homeless and runaway youth, queried the schools if anyone was reported to be homeless – none were on the night of Jan. 23, though that’s not always the case. A decrease in the unsheltered count this year was also likely, in large part, due to the Rescue Mission putting people up at St. Paul’s this year when the temperature dropped below freezing. Last year, in accordance with a state mandate to give shelter below freezing, people were staying in the Rescue Mission lounge at night, where they couldn’t sleep, and so counted as “unsheltered.”

Tompkins County Point-in-Time Numbers, Unsheltered

2017: 20 (16 male, 4 female)

2016: 32

2015: 18

Tompkins County Point-in-Time Numbers, Emergency Shelters (Rescue Mission, Advocacy Center, DSS hotel stays)



2017: 31

2016: 33

2015: 52

Tompkins County Point-in-Time Numbers, Transitional Housing



2017: 22

2016: 44

2015: 40

Slides from Tompkins County Continuum of Care:

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