Counting Homeless a Tough Job for Census : Migrants: Advocates for the homeless say the government underestimates the difficulty of reaching illegal aliens to get an accurate count.

The nationwide barriers to counting the homeless in the 1990 census are even more daunting in San Diego County, advocates for the homeless complain, putting the county in danger of a big financial loss.

“The Census Bureau is coming from another locale, and they are simply not aware of the situation, especially in North County,” said Andrea Mintz of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless.

Counting migrant workers who live in camps among the canyons of North County represents different problems and requires different methods from counting the more typical homeless populations in urbanized areas, said Mintz, who chairs the task force’s census committee.

“When I found out about their methodology for counting the homeless, I was just kind of shocked,” she said. “That’s really not going to work.”

The task force issued a report in mid-February expressing concerns that the homeless population will be drastically undercounted in the survey this year because the Census Bureau does not understand the dynamics involved in counting the homeless in San Diego. Illegal immigrants, whether on urban streets or rural encampments, fear government officials and will avoid census workers, they say, while the large numbers of non-English speakers present other challenges.

At least in urban areas, the advocates say, most of the hangouts of the homeless are well known--shelters, cheap hotels and parks. But there is no easy way to identify the tent communities that have sprung up in North County. The migrant workers live in hundreds of small encampments in the hills of Escondido, Carlsbad, Oceanside and other communities.

“They’re geographically scattered,” said Connie Saldana of the North County Interfaith Center. “Although there are a few large camps, most live in smaller ones. There are so many people living in small camps of just two or three.”

The outcome could make a major dollar difference to the county. Dan Conway, a spokesman for the Census Bureau, said that for every homeless person not counted--whether in the country legally or not--the county loses $150 in federal funds annually for the next 10 years. This decade’s census-taking of the homeless, the second ever, would be more extensive than in 1980, Conway said, with more interaction with community groups and agencies.

But simply finding where the migrant workers sleep at night is a problem. Local homeless advocates, who are responsible for compiling a list of migrant camp locations, said they have been given too little time to do the job.

“We’re short on time with an enormous task to perform,” Saldana said. “We know it’s not going to be accurate because the odds are so much against it. The point is that we have to make an attempt.

“If I had a lot more people that could dedicate time, we could come up with a pretty accurate list,” Saldana said. “It is very likely that we will miss a few camps. At this point, we’re missing most of them.”

To date, Saldana has found 78 migrant camps in North County.

“There’s still lots out there that we haven’t identified. For instance, we haven’t identified any in Ramona, and I know there are some there,” Saldana said.

Millie Gordon, who helped in the 1980 census of North County migrant workers, called this year’s one-night count a farce and “a waste of time and energy.”

Gordon and 14 others counted the North County homeless from April to mid-August in 1980 and found about 18,000 migrants.

“I don’t think it’s possible to get anywhere near a correct count with this new method,” Gordon said. “The people who are spread out in the hooches and spider holes and aren’t in a big group, who’s going to count them? They’re going to do it in a one-day period, that’s not possible. There’s not enough time and its not being done very realistically.”

Conway defended the bureau, saying that it contacted agencies that help the homeless in 1988 and again in 1989 to help them prepare for the upcoming count. But the agencies only started recently to compile their lists, he said.

Another barrier to counting the migrant population is the shortage of bilingual census takers. To help, the Census Bureau expects to hire bilingual noncitizens with legal residency in the United States. Previously, federal policy did not allow the bureau to hire noncitizens.

Finally, there is the task of getting undocumented people to cooperate with census takers. Although people will not be asked their residential status and all census information is confidential, undocumented persons tend to shy from interaction with government representatives for fear of deportation.

“People that have a pattern of fleeing from strangers might not want to be counted, especially not having been educated ahead of time about the purpose of the count,” Saldana said.

The Census Bureau launched an advertising campaign to educate the migrant homeless on the census, particularly its confidentiality, with spots on Spanish-language radio stations and flyers in Spanish. While the campaign is a good idea, Mintz said the amount of resources being put into the effort is “not sufficient.”

Mintz also expressed concern over the count of the general homeless population. Most homeless people have no interest in the census and they make it a point to conceal where they spend the night, Mintz said.

“This isn’t a priority for the homeless, they’re not interested, and they’re reluctant to talk to anyone that smells like government,” Mintz said. “Chances are, they’re not going to be too cooperative.”

But Conway said that the most important part of the homeless count will be the head count, and the questions being asked are few and simple. The five questions being asked the homeless concern the person’s race, sex, age, marital status and whether they are of Hispanic origin.

The Census Bureau plans to take its count of all the homeless on the night of March 20 through the early morning of March 21. Census takers will go to shelters, cheap hotels and street locations that have been identified by local homeless advocates as congregating places for the homeless.

The count of those in migrant camps will take place from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. on March 21.

Families that are doubled up in single-family dwellings, people in shelters for abused women, and homeless people living in tents at commercial campgrounds will be counted as part of the regular census operations.

“If we can find out where the homeless are, we have the resources to go to those locations in one night,” Conway said. “It’s not a matter of people power.”

But homeless advocates say enumerators won’t find out where the homeless are because they don’t want to be found.

“If the homeless are in Balboa Park, they’re in trees and bushes and hard to find, and you really don’t want to go there anyway,” Mintz said. She estimates that only 10% of the homeless population sleep in shelters while up to 90% may live on the street, “but you can’t find them.”

Conway admitted that the count will be “conservative,” but that they are doing what they can. Concerning Balboa Park, the Census Bureau plans a sweep of the area with enumerators going in groups up to four, armed with flashlights and highly visible vests identifying them as census takers.

One of the points of contention between census officials and homeless advocates has been whether to count the homeless in soup kitchens. Homeless advocates think that counting people while they are gathered in one place would provide a more accurate count and would be easier to do. Census officials, however, are afraid of counting people twice--where they eat and where they sleep.

Conway said the bureau’s policy is to count people where they sleep, and that policy applies to the homeless also.

“The formal official position of the bureau is that we will not count people standing in line at soup kitchens,” Conway said. But since many soup kitchens also provide shelter to a small number of their patrons, the bureau will count some people at the soup kitchens.

“The plan is only to count those people that reside at the shelter,” Conway said.

To help in the count, the county board of supervisors recently decided to open the cold weather shelters to the homeless normally used only under winter conditions. By gathering many of the homeless in one place, they hope to not only get a more accurate count but also to get more extensive demographic information, said Nancy Allen, chief of staff at Supervisor John MacDonald’s office.

But the effect of not counting at soup kitchens could drastically hurt the results of the count, workers with the homeless contend.

“It probably takes a third off of those out of the group that would have been counted,” said Frank Landerville of the Regional Task Force, which is financed by San Diego city and county and the United Way. “I think the chances of being able to find those people after they leave the soup kitchens are very poor, especially those that are mentally alert enough to find secure and safe places to sleep, because if they are secure and safe, they aren’t going to be found.

“Homeless advocates and social workers couldn’t find all the homeless in one evening. I just don’t believe that census enumerators can find them when others cannot.”