Since 2005, counties nationwide have conducted a biennial official Point in Time (PIT) count of people experiencing homelessness at a given point in time, per the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The department requires Continuums of Care that receive HUD funding to perform the count, which takes place during the last 10 days in January and is tied to federal funding for homeless resources.
The massive 2019 PIT count found that most California counties still use a paper-and-pen method to gather data but that some have evolved, using technology to assist, streamline and simplify.
Taking Smartphones, Apps to the Streets
This year, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties deployed the Homeless Point-in-Time Counts solution — a configuration of Survey123 and Operations Dashboard, both for ArcGIS and developed by Esri — for the count.
The more than 1,000 volunteers who helped in Orange County’s count, which took place Jan. 23-24, downloaded the app onto their personal devices just like they would any other app, the county's Director of Care Coordination Susan Price said.
“Twenty-eight questions were asked in the survey, and the survey is customizable to whatever questions the jurisdiction wants to ask,” Price said, noting that while HUD requires the county ask many questions and report the answers back to it, some local questions were added. “Every volunteer has this on their phone, and they go out and ask people if they want to be surveyed and ask them if they're homeless or not. If they are, then it goes through the length of the survey.”
As each survey is completed during the count, Price said, it populates on a GIS pin map, giving officials in the county’s five deployment centers a real-time view of surveys completed across the jurisdiction, as well as the total number of surveys completed at that moment in time.
“As it's happening, you watch the number going up,” she added. “Also on the bottom of the same dashboard, we had a homeless veteran [count], so every time there was a veteran surveyed, that number would go up. It was a smaller number, but it was a subset of the total.”
While most volunteers used the app during the count, Price said, some paper surveys were still completed, which means the county doesn’t yet have its PIT total.
“Paper surveys were done if a person's phone died,” she said. “And if the food bank counts 60 people, you don't want 60 pins at that location, so they used paper surveys.”
To get the true final count, the paper surveys must be tallied, and the electronic surveys must be de-duplicated to ensure no one was counted twice. While the deadline to get this final number to HUD is April 1, Price said she hopes this new process will make results compilation a quicker process, and facilitate the county’s release of results to the public before April 1.
And there are more benefits to using the app: In addition to enhancing the volunteers’ experience by making the survey faster and simpler, it also contains embedded logic.
“Depending on the answer to a question, it changes the subsequent questions based on the prior answer,” she said. “It's just an efficient way to do it.”
Another major benefit was that all the volunteers could see their contributions to the overall results, and Price said the biggest advantage for her is the GIS mapping of locations where surveys were completed.
“So you can really go back and look at that data and say, ‘You know, we had, say, 200 homeless veterans,’ and then you can look at the data and see the giant map for every veteran, and see if there's a certain part of the county where there are more veterans, or more seniors or more youth. It really helps us inform future activities based on the results.”
Riverside County’s experience was also positive. Nearly 800 volunteers used the app to access the Web-based survey, which Deputy County Executive Officer for Homelessness Solutions Natalie Komuro said was created by the county’s Department of Public Social Services (DPSS) specifically for the PIT count.
Using the app made it much easier to enter data — and thanks to that embedded logic, surveyors asked questions that were relevant only for the person being interviewed.
“If, for example, they didn’t have children present, then no questions about kids would show up,” she said. “This made the interview time shorter.”
Komuro also noted that the app provided a precise geographic location of each interview; that all information was more easily aggregated and mapped, and done in real time; and that the county anticipates a shorter timeframe for cleaning data and determining final count numbers.
In addition, if any volunteer encountered a veteran and indicated it on the app, she said, “an email would be generated and sent to the DPSS PIT coordinator, who would then deploy a vehicle to assist and transport veterans.”
Though Riverside County hasn’t yet held debriefings after its PIT count, Komuro said she expects it to identify improvements needed for next year’s count.
“Based on my own use, I am wondering about the feasibility of tracking other data,” she said. “For example, when I asked two different people whether they have HIV or AIDS, they said no, but they have Hepatitis C. There may be other questions that would help us better target county services and outreach.”
Enlisting Drones
In San Diego County, the Regional Task Force on the Homeless’ PIT survey began Jan. 25 and was conducted using the pen-and-paper method — but the Chula Vista Police Department used drones to help officers involved in the count get aerials of the homeless populations.
The department participates in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program, and flew its drones over several areas in the county to find homeless encampments prior to the PIT count.
“On the north side of our city, there is a river valley area and there's one (on) our South Side,” said Lt. Henry Martin of the Chula Vista Police Department, adding that the department used the drone in the north side. “The nickname of the area is called The Jungle. … There's a lot of brush, higher trees, and it's hard to see throughout the area — like clear line of sight from ground level.”
This is where the drones were a huge help. Martin said that the day before the count, participating Chula Vista police officers flew them over the area to verify that previously encountered encampments were still there and to look for any new areas.
“It's harder to see from ground level,” he said, “but with the drone capability, you're looking from above; you can see the tarps or the different colors — the dots that stand out — in contrast to the natural vegetation.”
Locating encampments ahead of the count ultimately saves a lot of time since officers aren’t wandering aimlessly in the early morning trying to find the encampments, Martin said, but the aerial views also help with officer safety.
“It was raining the days prior to the count so there was mud, there was some flooding in certain areas, there are ravines, and there's the potential for there to be some type of dangerous environment based on the physical layout of the area,” he said. But with the aerial drone footage, they weren’t stumbling around in the dark. “They know exactly where they're going.”
And that helps when approaching the camps too, Martin said, as officers getting close to an encampment can announce themselves from a safe distance versus stumbling upon the camp and startling its inhabitants, causing them to take a defensive posture.
“We don't want to misinterpret their posture and assume they’re trying to attack us.” Martin said, “It helps us avoid any miscommunication or misidentification, so the situation doesn't escalate because of the spur-of-the-moment surprise that here we come walking through the middle of their campsite.”
The State Perspective
The California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency (BCSH) is responsible for homelessness at the state level, but it doesn’t have a direct role in the PIT count. It does, however, informally urge the Continuums of Care to get out there and do the counts, said Deputy Secretary of Communications Russ Heimerich. In addition, members of the BCSH’s California Homeless Coordinating and Financing Council (HCFC) serve as volunteers collecting data during the count.
And that data is instrumental to the agency.
In August 2018, the HCFC announced the launch of the Homeless Emergency Aid Program (HEAP) — a $500 million block grant program aimed at providing direct assistance to cities and counties to address the state’s homelessness crisis.
“We distributed to all 43 Continuums of Care and California's 11 largest cities,” Heimerich said, “and the distribution of that money was based on the Point-in-Time count from 2017, which is the last one we have.”
The BCSH also uses the PIT count as one factor in determining funding for various homeless-related programs within the Department of Housing and Community Development, such as No Place Like Home and California Emergency Solutions and Housing.
Currently the agency is using data from the 2017 PIT count, but once the official HUD numbers from this count are released — which Heimerich said are expected in June or July — they will begin using that data.
“Pretty much everyone will use that [data] going forward,” he said.
