"Our goal is to engage every person we see who is homeless," said Tamera Kohler, CEO of the San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless.
Kohler said volunteers in next Thursday's pre-dawn count should be able to get more information than in past counts by using apps instead of paper surveys. The new method should make surveys go faster, and going all-electric eliminates the possibility of counters running out of paper surveys, which happened to some volunteers last year.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires all federally funded agencies known as continuums of care to conduct a count of homeless people in their area at least every other year. The Regional Task Force on the Homeless conducts the count annually, and the collected data is used as part of a HUD formula that determines the continuum of care's federal funding.
The Task Force has coordinated the countywide count about 12 years, and its methodology has evolved over time. Following HUD's requirement, homeless people in shelters are counted separately while unsheltered homeless people are counted on sidewalks and in parks, vehicles and other outdoor areas.
The unsheltered count is conducted in the pre-dawn hours to reduce the chance of mistakenly counting someone who is not homeless or counting a homeless person twice, which might happen in the daytime hours when people are moving about.
It's not an exact science. Last year's count found 8,102 homeless people countywide, but Kohler said the actual number certainly is higher. Besides the people who are missed in the one-night count, the count also doesn't include people who may have drifted in and out of homeless that year or are sleeping on a couch at a friend or relative's house.
"The point-in-time count is a required activity, but it isn't the only data we have about a homeless population, and it doesn't represent numbers over a full year," she said. Kohler estimates between 25,000 and 30,000 people countywide may experience homelessness at one time during the year.
A simple headcount also doesn't give detailed information about the person counted, but volunteers in 2018 began collecting demographic data from people they encountered. Kohler said last year they collected data from 47 percent of the people they interacted with, just short of their 50 percent goal.
Surveys include questions about a person's race, physical and mental health, drug and alcohol use and how long they've been homeless.
Also this year, the task force will collect data on how many homeless people in the county were former foster children. The Rev. Shane Harris, president of the civil rights group the People's Alliance for Justice, asked Kohler last month if that information could be collected.
At a new conference outside San Diego City Hall on Wednesday, Harris, Kohler, San Diego City Councilman Chris Ward and others announced that the data would be collected throughout 2019, although not during the Thursday Point-in-Time Count.
The task force in past years had asked homeless youth if they had been in foster care, but now homeless adults also will be asked the question.
Harris said he believes the task force will be the first continuum of care in the nation to seek the information, which he would like to be collected nationwide to help determine if former foster youth are over-represented in homeless populations.
Ward and Kohler also said the data will be helpful in studying the causes of homelessness, and Harris said the data could persuade the county to provide more services for foster youth aging out of the system to help prevent them from become homeless.
Kohler said she had considered including the question as part of the Point-in-Time Count, but instead decided to ask it throughout the years in other encounters with homeless people, which she said would reveal more accurate information.
In other changes to this year's event, drones operated by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department will fly over large open areas to find homeless encampments sometime before the volunteers go out Thursday morning. The flights will be conducted during the day, and their findings will be used to help volunteers find homeless people in canyons and other areas after sunrise Thursday.
The task force also is working with the Chula Vista Police Department, which last year used its drones to find homeless encampments.
In an effort to get a more accurate count of how many homeless people live in recreational vehicles, Kohler said the task force this year is working with some RV dwellers who have offered to help them find others who live in their vehicles.
Last year was the first time the task force had tried to include RV dwellers in a separate category, but counters found several challenges, including encounters with people who denied they were homeless.
©2020 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
