Nation’s 1st Homeless Count Is Hit and Miss : Census: While bureau officials call the effort a success, critics claim it was woefully inadequate.
The nation’s first census of homeless people, at best, was a hit-and-miss operation.
While officials of the U.S. Census Bureau pronounced the effort a success Wednesday, reports from communities large and small indicated the overnight campaign to count street people and shelter dwellers frequently was botched.
Census Bureau officials said the results of the homeless census, which involved about 15,000 census takers assigned to visit more than 20,000 locations, will not become available until next year. Within hours after the dusk-to-dawn effort concluded, however, critics were saying that the census is not likely to resolve the decade-long debate over how many Americans are homeless. Estimates have ranged from a few hundred thousand to a few million.
Many of the more than 200 field enumerators who fanned out across Orange County expressed surprise that more people weren’t discovered living on the streets.
“I think we’ve read too many stories--they had us believing the homeless would be swarming all over the place,” said Joe Montes, Fullerton census district manager. “We could be coming face-to-face with an exaggeration of the (homeless) population. We’ll find out when we pool our numbers.”
But homeless advocates answered that such perceptions are inaccurate.
Susan Oakson, coordinator of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, said she suspects that census takers missed several pockets of Orange County’s homeless people, who have been estimated to number upwards of 10,000.
“This is a huge job for the Census Bureau,” Oakson said. “Many homeless people were missed. It’s difficult to find people sleeping in their cars, for instance. It’s difficult to distinguish the homeless living in low-cost motels. There is just not a perfect system for doing this.”
Oakson said it would be wrong to surmise that Orange County is relatively free of homeless people based on the tales of census takers who returned from the field Wednesday morning. Unlike the highly visible street people of other urban areas such as Los Angeles, the homeless of Orange County tend to melt into the backdrop of society, particularly as night falls, she said.
But even in such urban strongholds, critics were charging that the count had missed a sizable chunk of the homeless population.
“I have a strong sense there was a tremendous undercount,” said Jessica Heinz, a Los Angeles assistant city attorney who spent Tuesday night monitoring the homeless count. Heinz said census takers arrived at several places late, after homeless people who had been waiting to be counted had left. And she said counters never came to one downtown shelter.
Her concerns were echoed in other cities.
“I told 60 million people on the ‘Today’ show that there would be an accurate count of the homeless in this city,” the Rev. Del Maxfield said at his Denver Rescue Mission. “If what we are looking at in Denver is indicative of what happened across the nation, I’ll be the first to say it didn’t work.”
The accuracy of the count is a potent political issue--with money and power riding on its outcome. The size of the homeless population helps determine both the amount of federal aid that cities receive and the number of elected officials who will represent them in Congress and state legislatures.
Illustrating the stakes, two cities in southeast Los Angeles County actually were fighting over the right to claim 34 homeless men as their own. The men spend their days in Compton and then are bused at night to a shelter run by the Salvation Army in Bell.
Compton officials wanted them counted as Compton residents. But census officials had decided that the homeless people would be credited to Bell, where they were found sleeping Tuesday night. Compton officials scrambled to find a way to house the men for the night on temporary cots, but the plan did not work.
In several cities across the country, including Los Angeles, assessment teams retained by the Census Bureau tended to reinforce the prevailing pessimism about the homeless count’s accuracy.
“At best, I would give it a ‘C,’ ” said Kathryn Edin, an associate professor of sociology at North Point College in Chicago. Edin headed a monitoring effort in that city.
Moreover, in Denver, Detroit and Houston, census takers either overlooked or were locked out of large homeless shelters. In San Angelo, Tex., homeless counters spent the pre-dawn hours searching for street people and finding only deer and jack rabbits.
Homeless counters in a Brooklyn neighborhood fled from gunfire. No one was shot. Two census takers were robbed at knifepoint in Ft. Lauderdale. Elsewhere, they were cursed, chased off porches and menaced with a baseball bat. In Northern California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, census takers skipped known homeless habitats where shots were fired two years ago at census employees doing preparatory work for the 1990 census.
In Chicago, 60 observers took up positions at outdoor homeless gathering places in downtown neighborhoods as part of the census-assessment effort. Census takers showed up at half of the locations, according to Edin. And where they appeared, they did little more than count heads.
Louisa Stark, who directed another assessment effort in Phoenix, told a similar story. Census takers came to only half of the homeless locations observed by 57 monitors, Stark said. The news was worse from the Census Bureau’s homeless assessment in Los Angeles. Officials of the Homeless Health Care Project recruited 79 people to pose as homeless people on Skid Row street corners and other spots frequented by the down-and-out.
Michael Cousineau, executive director of the Health Care Project, reported Wednesday that only 22 of the 79 people sent out were interviewed by census takers, and that just 35 of the 79 reported even seeing census enumerators.
Cousineau said no census takers were in evidence at one downtown theater where 250 homeless people were known to have spent the night. He said counters missed several other places where 20 to 25 homeless were congregated. Nor were census takers always eager to leave their cars when they came upon groups of homeless people, Cousineau said.
In Orange County, census takers failed to show up at Fountain Valley’s Thomas House Temporary Shelter to interview the four families residing there, a shelter spokeswoman said. But census takers did manage to find a small farmhouse operated by Irvine Temporary Housing to query the lone family in residence.
Gary Blasi, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation in Los Angeles and a board member of the National Coalition for the Homeless, estimated Wednesday that the census counted only 10% to 20% of the homeless population downtown and much less in other areas of the city.
John Reeder, the Census Bureau’s California regional director, said he had no idea how many homeless people were counted or missed Tuesday night. And while he said that census takers would be going out Wednesday to a few locations that had been overlooked, he was upbeat about what went on Tuesday night.
But when Brian Kimbrough, a census taker sitting next to Reeder, was asked how many homeless people were counted in Los Angeles, he replied, “We were getting 6 out of 10.” To which Reeder conceded: “That’s not a very good figure. . . . That would be a pretty bad count.”
In Washington, Census Bureau Director Barbara Bryant, while admitting there had been “problems and incidents” around the country, hailed the operation as a success.
“Shelter and Street night appears to have been a success,” Bryant said. “I believe our efforts have given us a good start on achieving our goal of a full and fair census of the American people.
“As a result of last night’s efforts,” Bryant said, “the various components of the homeless population can begin to receive their fair share of political representation and assistance programs that are based on population.”
Bryant’s confidence in the count came under fire from some quarters, although there was evidence that the homeless census had gone well in a number of places.
“When she says it is a success, she doesn’t know what she is talking about,” said David Hayden, a former Catholic priest who runs Justice House, a home for destitute families in Roanoke, Va. Hayden has been sleeping on Washington, D.C., streets this winter to protest Congress’ failure to provide $25 billion a year for adequate housing.
But in Northern California, several homeless advocates said they thought the count had gone well. Several members of the Coalition on Homelessness, a San Francisco group, walked the city’s streets after 2 a.m. Wednesday to ask homeless people whether they had been counted.
“Virtually every one of them had,” said coalition member Josh Brandon.
With less than 100 census takers working in Detroit, only two of the city’s myriad abandoned homes were canvassed.
And although there were no reports of violence in Orange County, not all the census workers fared well. Richard Roden, manager of the Salvation Army Hospitality House in Santa Ana, said two census workers received a hostile greeting.
“They walked down to the area and began counting but became uneasy because the people were telling them to get lost,” Roden said.
The counters then came upon two men who apparently were shooting up drugs.
“They recoiled from that,” he said. “They were frightened and left.” As a result, Roden said, dozens of homeless people were left uncounted.
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Eric Bailey and Carla Rivera in Orange County, Michele Fuetsch and John H. Lee in Los Angeles, Daniel Weintraub in Sacramento, Don Shannon in Washington, Shawn Pogatchnik in New York, James Risen in Detroit, Lianne Hart in Houston, Louis Sahagun in Denver and Jim Herron-Zamora in San Francisco.
