The official count of Long Beach’s homeless population shows a decline in the number of people living without a roof over their heads, although city data released Tuesday show the homeless population has spread to areas where they have not previously congregated.

Kelly Colopy, the city’s director of health and human services, said volunteers who participated in the most recent homeless count noticed they had tallied fewer people than they had expected.

“We believed it was going to go down. What we didn’t know was by what percent,” she said.

Numbers released late Tuesday show that volunteers counted 1,863 homeless people during the city’s most recent census of its homeless population in late January. That number signifies a 21 percent reduction in overall homeless from 2015, when the prior count took place.

Among those who were counted as homeless, 686 people were classified as being chronically homeless. That number is 26 percent less than the number of chronically homeless persons counted two years prior, according to city figures.

Colopy and Long Beach officials attributed the reduction in homeless to several factors. Among them: Increased capacity at Century Villages at Cabrillo, a westside facility serving homeless veterans and their families; additional federal funding for veterans’ housing vouchers and supportive services, as well as an increase in Section 8 housing vouchers.

Altogether, city government reported those resources and other programs allowed Long Beach officials to help 2,278 people find housing in 2016, compared with 1,214 the prior year.

Homelessness spreads

City officials acknowledged the reported decline in homelessness is likely the opposite of what Long Beachers may have expected, given the high visibility of homelessness across the city.

This is due to several factors, officials said, including increased development in the downtown area, maintenance projects along river banks and wetlands and open space restoration.

For example, the homeless population has appeared to migrate from the Traffic Circle area toward easterly neighborhoods like El Dorado Park South, which aroused worries last year.

Colopy cited the example of Lincoln Park, which had been a longtime gathering spot for the homeless but is now less accessible due to the construction of a new Civic Center. Whereas someone may have seen about 20 people at the park in days past, it’s now more likely to see several clusters of five or so people in an empty parking lot.

That said, movements of homeless people to neighborhoods where they have not been as visible as they have been recently is not a sudden phenomenon.

In 2013, 64 percent of Long Beach’s homeless population lived in places within the boundary lines of council districts 1, 2 and 3, Colopy said. That’s an area ranging from the Port of Long Beach to downtown and on to Belmont Shore and the city’s boundary with Seal Beach.

By this year, however, only 51 percent of Long Beach’s homeless lived in that area. Meanwhile, the percentage of homeless people counted within the lines of council districts 4, 5 and 6 increased from 12 percent to 20 percent. Those districts include the area around Long Beach Poly High School, Cambodia Town, the Traffic Circle area, Los Altos and the aforementioned El Dorado Park South.

Incoming resources

Los Angeles County supervisors voted earlier this month to keep homeless shelters in Long Beach and Bell operating through November. The shelters had been set to close in March.

Supervisors want those shelters to become year-round refuges for the homeless after county officials begin to collect revenues from Measure H, the ballot measure county voters approved in March.

Measure H raises sales tax rates by one quarter of a percentage point to finance aid to the homeless.