A Pre-Dawn Hunt for Homeless : Census: Faced with abandoned buildings and dark parks, some searchers stayed in the comfort of their cars.

“You sure you don’t want to go down there, Kim?” Bill asked his fellow census-taker, as they peered from a bridge down toward the entrance of a dark railroad tunnel near Chatsworth before dawn Wednesday.

“Uh, no,” said Kim, playing her flashlight beam on the forbidding-looking opening 30 feet below.

“Just checking,” replied Bill, grinning.

From about 1:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m., Bill, Kim, John and Jackie worked one of the most unusual night jobs they may ever hold: for $7.50 an hour, they helped the U.S. Census Bureau count homeless people in the San Fernando Valley.

But the four young census takers, who did not want to give their last names, didn’t tramp along railroad tracks, muddy their feet in river washes or pick their way through shadowed parks.

Instead, they spent virtually their entire two-hour shift in the comfort of their car, searching for the homeless by shining flashlights out the windows. In more than 40 miles of driving, the census-takers left the car exactly twice: once to buy snacks at a 7-Eleven store and again to peer down at the railroad tunnel’s entrance.

Their tally for the night: one homeless person, sleeping in a field.

The group was among 100 freshly minted census takers dispatched in the pre-dawn hours to scour Valley parks, abandoned buildings, trash bins and other spots as part of the Census Bureau’s unprecedented effort to enumerate the country’s elusive homeless population.

Although they said actual results won’t be released until next year, local census officials pronounced the Valley effort a success. Census takers visited 85 homeless gathering spots in the region during the one-night count.

“It went very well. We accomplished all our sites and we counted as many people as we could count,” said Tom Nowlin, who managed the census operation in most of the Valley.

Nowlin said one census taker stepped on a nail and required a tetanus shot. But unlike some locations elsewhere in the country, no census employees were threatened in the Valley, he said.

Nowlin declined to say how many Valley homeless were counted, but the numbers appeared to be low, based on interviews with census takers, who worked in four-person teams. In a sampling of five census teams, each reported finding three or fewer homeless people.

But faced with blacked-out parks and shadowy buildings, different census takers seemed to approach their task with different levels of vigor.

Wearing white vests marked “Census Taker” and hefting Thomas Bros. map books Juan Merchan, 28, of Canoga Park and John Burton, 33, of Sepulveda searched carefully on foot in their designated area.

At Vanowen Street and Canoga Avenue, they examined a new complex of public storage spaces. They aimed flashlights at bushes and corners and picked up the lid of a trash bin to hunt for possible occupants.

Walking on Eton Street, Merchan beamed his light into the cab of a blue pickup truck, prompting a man inside to pop up his head.

“Sir, would you like to be counted for the census?” Merchan asked the man, who bounded out of the truck clad in a T-shirt and undershorts.

The man, who identified himself as Eddie, said with a smile that he had a home.

Merchan and Burton moved on.

At the back of an abandoned building on Canoga Avenue, Merchan and his partner shone their lights through holes in the wall, illuminating some blankets. They called inside, but got no response and left.

By contrast, Bill’s team appeared to make only cursory searches of possible homeless sites along their route, a broad corridor paralleling the Simi Valley Freeway between San Fernando and the Santa Susana Pass railroad tunnel west of Chatsworth.

The group drove through Chatsworth Park South, without getting out of their car, in about 90 seconds, their flashlights not penetrating the far reaches of the park.

Asked if the group had followed Census Bureau search policy, Nowlin said, “If they didn’t see any people to enumerate, what was the need to get out of the car?”

Marcia Hunt, founder of the San Fernando Valley Mayors’ Fund for the Homeless, claimed that the Valley count “could not possibly” be accurate. Hunt said there are up to 15,000 homeless people in the area.

“The Valley is 22 miles by 11 miles by my count and that is immense,” she said. “And when you realize that homeless people can be found in any part of the Valley and all the surrounding hills, how can even an army of workers locate them all?”

“I hope it helps, but I most of all hope that the legislators in Washington will understand that whatever number is given is just the best count census takers could get, but it doesn’t begin to be an accurate count,” she said.