Counters on Trail of the Homeless

Wearing white vests that identify them as census takers, about 110 men and women tonight will visit Ventura County’s emergency shelters, venture into river bottoms and canyons, and check campgrounds in an attempt to count the area’s homeless population.

The workers, called enumerators, will visit 90 sites identified by local government officials and service providers as places frequented by the homeless, said Geary-Ellen Williams, manager of the local census office.

The local count is part of a nationwide effort by the Census Bureau to tally the number of homeless people who live in the United States. Current estimates by service providers of the county’s homeless population range from 2,000 to 5,000.

The sites include five county-operated campgrounds that the Board of Supervisors has opened free of charge tonight to facilitate the tally, Supervisor Madge Schaefer said Monday.

The supervisors opened the 262 campsites to the homeless because “for every person we count, the county gets roughly $200 in federal funds” for programs ranging from subsidized housing to large-print books for seniors, Schaefer said.

Although the 1990 census will not include every homeless person, the dusk-to-dawn effort is expected to more accurately gauge the number of people living on the streets than in previous years, census officials have said.

The 1980 census undercounted the U.S. population by about 1.4%, said John Reeder, the Census Bureau’s regional director for California. Statewide, the undercount was 3%.

In Ventura County, the undercount ranged from 1% in more affluent neighborhoods to 5% in lower-income areas, county officials said.

Beginning at dusk today, the workers will gather at the district headquarters in Ventura, where 100 cardboard desks were set up in anticipation of the paper work generated by the count.

From there, the workers, in teams of three, will fan out to interview the homeless at the more than nine shelters in the county.

But workers may encounter some resistance, said Carol Roberg co-director of the Ventura County Rescue Mission, an 82-bed shelter for single men in Oxnard.

“A lot of street people don’t want their names known because they are estranged from their families and ashamed of being on the skids,” Roberg said. “So we’ve assured them that census takers would simply perform a head count.”

A second shift of census takers will begin working early in the morning Wednesday, with workers venturing into such places as Hobo Jungle, a homeless encampment at the mouth of the Ventura River, only “when it gets light because there are rocks and lots of bushes, and it would be dangerous to go there in the dark,” Williams said.