Imagine if someone took a look at your bank account on the last Friday in January every year. What would it reveal about your financial health?

It wouldn’t include checks you’ve written that haven’t been cashed. It wouldn’t include money you’ve earned but not deposited. If you’re better off this year than last, is it because your income is going up or did you get a one-time holiday windfall from a relative? Are you really headed in the right direction?

That’s the kind of dilemma that arises in San Diego after the annual homeless count. Service providers, policy makers and the public try to figure out what the numbers say, and what they don’t. What they mean.

This year’s tally, released Thursday, showed a decrease in the number of homeless people in the county, from 9,116 in 2017 to 8,576, a 6 percent drop. The number of homeless living on the street (as opposed to shelters and temporary housing) also went down, from 5,621 in 2017 to 4,990, an 11 percent change.


Elected officials, who have spent millions of dollars and countless hours tackling what has become one of the nation’s most vexing problems, especially on the West Coast, were encouraged by those results.

“If things had gone up, I would have been depressed,” said county Supervisor Ron Roberts, chair of the board of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, which coordinates the annual count.

But he and others are cautious about drawing too many conclusions. “It gives us momentum to move forward,” San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said. “It is not mission accomplished.”


Part of their hesitation comes from the well-documentated limitations of what’s known officially as the Point-in-Time Count, which everybody involved acknowledges can’t possibly find and tally every homeless person, especially in a county that has 627 census tracts and covers 4,261 square miles.

And part of it is the numbers themselves, which are sometimes more puzzling than illuminating. After years of community focus on helping homeless veterans, for example, why did their numbers go up 24 percent in the new tally, including a 45 percent jump in those who are unsheltered?

“The biggest head-scratcher is what’s going on with veterans,” said San Diego City Council member Chris Ward.

Those trying to reduce homelessness on a daily basis said they’ve come to see the annual count as more of a public-awareness tool than a full accounting. Almost every media outlet in town reports the tally, and for a short while anyway, the issue is front and center.


“It’s a one-night, one-time snapshot,” said Gordon Walker, chief executive officer of the regional task force. “It doesn’t provide all the answers.”

Why it matters

So why do it?

The count is required by the federal government for regions that want to receive homeless-assistance money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This year, San Diego County got almost $20 million.

Although the regulations call for a biennial count, San Diego does it annually, always on the last Friday in January, and it’s a huge undertaking. The county has the fourth-largest homeless population in the nation.


On Jan. 26 of this year, from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., more than 1,300 volunteers fanned out across the county to tally the unsheltered homeless sleeping in tents, on sidewalks, in cars. They were assigned to specific census tracts to avoid duplication. Some walked the streets in teams; others drove.

They counted 4,990 people, including 1,262 in vehicles and 1,253 in tents or hand-built structures. (“Counted” in this case means using a multiplier of 1.75 for tents and 2.03 for vehicles.)

A report last year by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty called efforts like this “severely flawed” because they result in “significant” undercounts of the homeless. It pointed to a 2001 study that estimated the nationwide population— 553,742 last year — is really 2.5 to 10.2 times larger.

It’s not just the inherent difficulties of finding people who are sleeping in out-of-the-way places, according to the report. HUD also regularly changes its guidelines for the tabulations, making year-to-year comparisons problematic.


For example, the definition of “chronically homeless” changed several years ago, and this time there was a shift in how domestic-violence victims and people in recreational vehicles are counted.

Another study, led by a University of New Hampshire statistician, looked at housing costs and concluded last year that the number of people living on the streets in San Diego County could be 50 percent higher than what the Point in Time count shows.

Walker said he’s reasonably confident that this year’s count is solid. The task force’s written report notes that “the county methodology cannot guarantee 100 percent accuracy. Many factors may contribute to missed counting opportunities.”

The street count is just one part of the annual tabulation. To determine how many homeless people were in emergency shelters and temporary housing on Jan. 26, the operators at more than 60 local facilities provided head-counts.


The result: 3,586 homeless people were in shelters. That includes 1,947 in emergency shelters and 1,575 in transitional housing. About 85 percent of the available beds were utilized that night, according to the report, which means about 630 were vacant.

A third part of the annual tally aims at getting a better idea of who the homeless are. More than 300 volunteers surveyed 1,009 unsheltered homeless adults at 33 sites around the county — libraries, church feeding programs, parks — from Jan. 26 to Jan. 31. They asked dozens of questions about the cause and duration of homelessness, employment history, health conditions, and the types of assistance they most frequently access.

That demographic information sometimes plays a key role in shaping programs.

The “so what” question

When policy makers and service providers look at the annual tally, they sometimes ask the bureaucratic version of the “so what” question: “What in here is actionable?”


That’s why, after the 2017 results showed that 16 percent of the unsheltered homeless would reconnect with family if they could, the Downtown San Diego Partnership ramped up a reunification program that provides free one-way bus tickets out of town.

Last year’s report also registered a large spike in tents and hand-built structures, especially in downtown San Diego — up 104 percent. That, along with the deadly hepatitis A outbreak, led to sidewalk-clearing and police sweeps in the city, and a 52 percent drop in the number of downtown tents, according to the most recent count.

When this year’s results were released Thursday, what jumped out at several observers, in addition to the increase in homeless veterans, was the apparent lack of progress with the region’s chronically homeless, who make up about 25 percent of the countywide homeless total. Their numbers went from 2,176 in 2017 to 2,171.

“This is a clear call to action for our community,” said Greg Anglea, chief executive officer of Interfaith Community Services and a board member of the regional task force.


The chronically homeless are defined as those who have been on the streets for a year or longer, or have experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. They have a diagnosed disability that prevents them from holding on to a job or housing.

Because they have a mortality rate that is up to nine times higher than that of the general population, and because they often use a disproportionate share of public resources — emergency rooms, fire and ambulance rescues, jails — a lot of time and money is spent trying to help them.

The three dormitory-style “bridge” shelter tents opened last winter in San Diego give priority to the chronically homeless, and hundreds more of them wound up there, according to the new report. The number who were sheltered went up almost 100 percent, from 389 to 771.

But moving them from shelters into what’s known as permanent supportive housing — a residence with access to counseling and other services — has proven difficult.


The most recent figures from the San Diego Housing Commission, which is funding the tents, show that 10 percent of the people exiting so far have gone into permanent housing (94 out of 946). That’s significantly below the goal — 65 percent into permanent housing — when the shelters opened.

Cost of housing is the main obstacle, according to Ruth Bruland, chief program officer for Father Joe’s Villages, which operates one of the tents. A recent report listed the average monthly rent in the county in March at $1,887, a record high.

“It’s a really tough environment for ending homelessness,” Bruland said.


john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com