Critics Warn Changes to Timing and Transparency Could Distort the City’s Homelessness Data for Years
San Francisco officials have announced a big change to the way they perform their citywide point-in-time count of homeless San Franciscans. The count, which usually takes place overnight, will now be held between 5 am and 10:30 am.
The city is also making moves to have the count carried out exclusively by city outreach workers, without the community volunteers who usually take part. Advocates worry that this will result in a severe undercount and a drastic decrease in transparency.
Timing Changes
San Francisco’s point-in-time count has typically been conducted overnight, the logic being that this is when the largest percentage of the homeless population would be visible on the streets or in the shelter system. Changing the count to an early morning timeframe may lead to an undercount as people get up, go to work, get moved along by police and local business owners, or just go about their lives before counting officials can get to them.
It’s unclear why the city is switching to an early morning timing, but it may be related to a new survey officials hope to combine with the point-in-time count. In the past, this survey has been carried out in the weeks following the count, but this year, it will all be rolled into one.
The city may anticipate that the people they find will be more inclined to talk to them and answer a few questions in the morning rather than overnight, when more people are sleeping or simply don’t want to be bothered.
The survey aims to capture demographic data as well as individuals’ answers to questions such as, “Are you homeless?” “What led to you being homeless?” and “Where did you sleep last night?”
Community Volunteers Get the Boot
Another concerning change involves who exactly will be carrying out point-in-time counts in San Francisco, both this year and in the future. Emily Cohen, Deputy Director of Communications for SF’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), had this to say about the change:
“To help ensure consistency and transparency of the count, we are relying heavily on trained outreach workers and city staff to conduct the count. Those two groups have always been a part of the count. But in the past, we have had more general volunteers, but we’ve had some training challenges with that in the past, so we’re sticking with city staff and trained outreach workers this year.”
Other advocates had a different perspective. Like the Executive Director of The Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach, who remarked, “They’re not allowing any volunteers on the count. And so, they’re relying on city outreach workers, who, in our experience, when they did the RV count, they missed 1 in 5 RVs. It means that it’s not open. And you don’t have the observers and the people participatory process that I think is really important to make sure that everything’s going well.”
Comparing Apples to Oranges
Advocates who object to changes to the point-in-time count methodology are worried that the combined effects of these changes may lead to a severe undercount of the actual number of homeless people living in San Francisco. They fear this apparent reduction will be used for political purposes, allowing people to pat themselves on the back without having actually achieved the results they’re taking credit for.
An undercount seems likely, but it will be hard to know for sure, even once the data from the point-in-time count are published in the spring. But what’s certain is that the changes in methodology will make it impossible to accurately compare this year’s data with past years’ data. Because it was gathered under completely different conditions, any trends that it may show are not trustworthy. The entire data set is essentially useless as a comparative tool.
HSH says they will continue using this count method for the next 10 years to build a solid data set for accurate comparisons. Still, until a few more years pass without changes, the city will be essentially operating in the dark. And since San Francisco conducts its PIT count biannually rather than annually, it will be even longer before we have enough data to compare apples to apples.
Chasing the Most Accurate Count
The point-in-time count has always been an approximation meant more to reveal general trends in homelessness than to actually nail down the exact number of unhoused people present in a given place. To the extent that that would ever be possible, it would certainly not be best accomplished by sending out a team of people with clipboards on a single winter’s night to make their best guess about which vehicles are occupied and how many people are sleeping in each tent. Its strength is in its ability to reveal general trends.
That’s why sacrificing that ability through changes that city officials say are meant to yield the most accurate count possible is a move that has many San Franciscans scratching their heads and questioning motives. In many ways, the exact number of actual individuals counted matters less than the overall ability to identify general trends early enough to act on them.
These changes to San Francisco’s point-in-time count will obscure the true trends for at least the next 2 years, as well as the prior 2 years. That’s 4 or more total years when the city will be flying blind, trying to tailor its homelessness response programs to rapidly shifting numbers that don’t give a clear picture of what’s actually happening on the ground.
That doesn’t help anyone. Except for the people who stand to gain a political boost by pointing to a line on a graph that appears to show local homelessness numbers going down, even though that’s far from the whole story.