It’s easy to spot the tattered tents of an encampment, stray shopping carts full of belongings, or someone shouldering an overloaded backpack topped with a bedroll.
But figuring out how to accurately measure homelessness so its root causes can be addressed is a challenge for which no perfect solution has been found.
Orange County officials announced last month that the federally required “point in time” count, taken over several days in February, showed a drop of more than 16% in the number of people on the streets and in the shelters of OC, compared with the 2019 count.
Now an advocacy group, Housing Is a Human Right Orange County, is arguing the county’s recent survey was inaccurate and, if done properly, would have shown an increase in homelessness on the street.
“Everyone who works in this field would admit that the point in time count is an extreme undercount at any time,” said Maura Mikulec, a social worker in south OC and member of the group raising questions.
Thomas Fielder, with the People’s Homeless Task Force OC, agreed with Mikulec that the point in time count is “severely flawed” and that it can be particularly hard to find families and people who are “couch-surfing” or living in cars or motels.
“For sure you’re missing people,” he said.
Mikulec pointed to other data she says contradicts the recently released numbers, which showed more than half of the roughly 5,700 unhoused people in OC were on the street – the rest were in shelters or other temporary housing.
She noted the county struggled to get volunteers to help with this year’s tally, and some of the counting teams didn’t have experienced people who knew where to look.
A 2019 survey from CalOptima, which insures the county’s poorest residents, concluded about 10,000 of its members were homeless, Mikulec noted, and some of the county’s own data on how many clients are served by various homeless programs points to higher numbers than the February countywide tally.
County officials said that while they understand the concerns with the point in time count and acknowledge the process has weakenesses, they’re constrained by rules the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sets. And, they said, no one believes their work is done simply because this year’s count was lower than the one in 2019.
Cities and counties must do a homeless count every two years, following HUD guidelines, to be eligible for some grants and other funding for housing and homeless services.
“We’re encouraged by the numbers, but we also know that the point in time count does not tell the whole story,” OC Director of Care Coordination Doug Becht said.
Matt Bates, vice president of City Net – a homeless services provider the county hired to help run the February count – said different agencies have different definitions of who is “homeless,” and HUD standards don’t allow them to include people in motels or doubled up in apartments.
“This is a particular data set for a particular purpose,” he said. “It should not be viewed in isolation.”
Becht said while there were fewer volunteers this year than in 2019, they sent out the same number of teams, and they canvassed some locations multiple times to make sure no areas got missed.
The county is already debriefing and discussing what could be improved for the next count, Becht said.
Bates pointed out that the 2019 count – which marked a shift from taking a smaller sample and extrapolating to more broadly surveying people across the entire county – was done the same way as this year’s tally, and “nobody questioned it then.”
The 2019 numbers showed what appeared to be a significant increase over 2017, but officials at the time cautioned that the two years used different methodologies and couldn’t fairly be compared.
Bates and Becht stressed that because the causes and duration of people being without shelter are varying and fluid, the point in time count is only a snapshot.
Mikulec said her group is urging the county to “be honest” about the point in time count’s flaws, look into using a by-name list to better track homeless people through the system and ensure they get the help they need.
The point in time count used “unique identifiers” rather than names, because officials worried people would be less likely to take a survey or share personal information such as mental health or substance use if their real name were attached. But Becht noted that the county does have the names of people who get services or are on housing waitlists.
Bates said he hopes the next count will drill down further on subgroups such as veterans and families, and he’d like the county to consider going to an annual count, as some cities do, though he realizes it’s a costly endeavor.
County Supervisor Katrina Foley, who organized a survey of the homeless in her district last year and commissioned an audit of what the county spends on homelessness, said the point in time count could use a few tweaks, but provides “foundational data” that policy makers can act on.
“What I gleaned from it is that we’re not doing enough for our veterans and we’re certainly not doing enough for seniors, and there are too many young people who are homeless,” she said.
“We’ve certainly made progress,” she said, “but we have a long way to go.”
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