Los Angeles County’s three-night homeless count will launch Tuesday evening, with volunteers heading out to tally encampments throughout the region, starting in communities like the San Fernando Valley.

Volunteers will be deployed from nearly 30 different locations throughout the Valley — including Chatsworth, Reseda, Encino, North Hollywood, Tujunga, Van Nuys and North Hills — to conduct the now annual census of a problem that has persisted in many communities in the area.

While homelessness last year dropped by 4 percent countywide (with the exception of Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, where separate counts are done), that count appeared to show the problem spreading to areas like the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, where numbers grew 5 percent last year to 7,739 people homeless on a January night.

Increases in the homeless population were also seen in the San Gabriel Valley and the Harbor area last year.

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This year’s count will again give a sense of the scale of the issue in the San Fernando Valley, where some like Porter Ranch resident Susan Gorman-Chang do outreach to homeless individuals and are hoping to try to bring more resources to to the area, such as a shelter or safe-parking sites for people living out of their vehicles.

Gorman-Chang will be among the more than 7,000 volunteers participating in this week’s count. She and others in her community have become much more aware of homelessness in recent years, she said.

“It’s a citywide problem,” she said.

That was not always the case. When she first moved to Porter Ranch in 1991, “I don’t think I saw anybody homeless here back then when we would walk the (nature) trails,” Gorman-Chang said.

Gorman-Chang thinks the experience of participating in the homeless count can also help bring even greater awareness to the issue.

“There is some value in driving around in your warm car and your warm vehicle, and you’re seeing people totally out in the elements on a winter night,” she said.

Since the last count, efforts to address homelessness have redoubled in the San Fernando Valley. Safe parking sites have been set up in some areas such as North Hills. Temporary housing for homeless women is in the works in Sylmar. And shelters are being considered in Sherman Oaks and Canoga Park.

Funding has also been pouring into services, shelters and permanent housing to reduce homelessness in the city of Los Angeles through Measure H, a 10-year sales tax increase, and $1.2 billion Proposition HHH bond measure.

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And San Fernando Valley residents have started to work together to tackle the issue. In Studio City, members of the neighborhood council helped assemble hygiene kits for homeless individuals in their neighborhood. In the West San Fernando Valley, an alliance was formed by several neighborhood council homelessness committees to help raise awareness about the issue through regular community forums. Their first event in December featured a virtual reality kiosk that gave attendees a taste of what it would be like to be face the threat of homelessness.

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Last year’s count found that 52,765 people were homeless on a given night throughout Los Angeles County, which is a 4 percent drop from the previous year’s count, while the city of Los Angeles saw a 6 percent decrease in the homeless population, down to 31,285 people.

Those results gave some public officials hope that they were moving in the right direction. This year’s count could continue to give a sense of whether progress is being made, especially now that more funding is available.

Los Angeles Homeless Authority officials say that the funding from Measure H, which is a countywide measure, has led to more outreach workers being hired, and more than 10,000 people placed into permanent housing.

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Despite the potential for more optimistic numbers, the challenge of finding housing persists for some. Gorman-Chang said a small group from their area has been helping a brother and sister who are homeless, but have hit a wall so far with getting them a place to live, despite federal funding being available to them.

“They have a Section 8 voucher, but we’re still trying to get them housing,” she said.