David Gillanders planned to wake up at 3:30 a.m. today. He intended to grab a flashlight, his bike and a messenger bag packed to the brim with surveys.

At 4:30 a.m., the 38-year-old Orange resident and hundreds of other volunteers were to deploy across the county for a massive effort to count all of the homeless people in a nearly 800-square-mile area.

Gillanders, a recreational biker, is responsible for the Santa Ana River Trail. It’s about a 28-mile journey for him from Anaheim to Huntington Beach, where he’ll spend hours counting homeless people living in the riverbed and asking them about their background, medical history and family.

Every other January, areas across the country conduct a mandated count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations, known as a “point-in-time count,” in order to receive federal funding for homeless services. Orange County receives $16 million to $17 million every year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said Karen Williams, president and CEO of 2-1-1 Orange County, one of the agencies organizing today’s count.

“(Homelessness) is such a difficult thing to measure. That’s why we have to do this big project every few years,” said Gillanders, who is director of residential programs at Human Options, a nonprofit focused on helping domestic violence victims. “It’s such a massive undertaking in a county that’s geographically so large.”

About 900 volunteers were to meet at five deployment centers – nonprofit agencies in Anaheim, Irvine, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach and San Clemente – before spreading out to target “hot” and “warm” spots where homeless people are expected.

For the past five months, homeless service provider agencies, health care agencies, homeless liaisons with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and individual cities have worked with 2-1-1 OC to map areas where the most homeless people have been seen and enclaves that might not be expected. Volunteers and 2-1-1 OC staff then visited the mapped areas to ensure they could be walked in one to two hours and that there are no barriers in the walking path.

But one caveat is that homeless people move from location to location for safety reasons, which is the “greatest challenge overall, for us,” Williams said.

The last point-in-time count two years ago tallied a total of 4,254 homeless people, consisting of 2,576 people in shelters and 1,678 unsheltered. Rain plagued the count two years ago, and people likely moved away from their expected locations, but more people were expected to be out this year. Based on the count, the 2013 annual estimate of people homeless during the course of the year was 12,707, Williams said.

The previous point-in-time count in 2011 found 6,939 homeless people on a single night, with an estimated 18,325 homeless people living in the county throughout that year.

More than families, the people who are chronically homeless in greater numbers are single individuals (and men more than women).

It’s difficult to predict what kind of changes have occurred since the last point-in-time count in January 2013, but today’s event will give a better idea of the picture.

Anecdotally, there has been an influx at the Santa Ana Civic Center, partly because of people who have been released from prison and are in re-entry programs, Williams said. Secondly, with increasing rents, families who have been barely holding on are now living in their cars because they can’t afford housing costs.

If there is an increase in this year’s homeless count, those would be two reasons driving it, Williams said.

“Conversely, we’re also seeing the economy improve, so people are getting jobs,” Williams said. “It’s just really hard. Orange County is one of the top most expensive places to live, so if you’re making a minimum wage, it’s really hard to afford a $1,600 to $1,700 monthly rent.”

Compared to the count two years ago, this year organizers have improved training for volunteers and have more robust mapping of where homeless people stay. Religious groups have provided a significant chunk of volunteers and donated hygiene kits to hand out, Williams said.

“There are a lot of misconceptions among the public in terms of what it means for someone to be homeless,” Gillanders said.

Being homeless, people use emergency rooms for their medical needs, run up public works costs with encampments and require police services – which fall on the burden of taxpayers.

“The truth is, it’s really expensive for people to live on the streets,” Gillanders said.

In the past couple of years, the focus has shifted to getting people into housing first and providing support services around that, a model Williams said has been occurring in the East for at least seven years – with “staggering” results.

Studies have shown it is much less expensive to house people first and offer services to help keep them off the street, Gillanders said.

“If you’ve witnessed homelessness or been a part of it, it’s a really great way to give back,” said Gillanders, who has been volunteering for the past two-three years. “And it gives us critical information that we need.”

Contact the writer: 949-492-4316 or kzhou@ocregister.com