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 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.

“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 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 the Salvation Army runs in Bell.

Compton officials wanted them counted as Compton residents. But census officials had decided 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, Texas, 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 did come, they did little more than count heads.

“We only saw one or two instances where enumerators actually interviewed people,” Edinsaid.

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, said Stark, who is director of the city’s nonprofit Community Housing Partnership.

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 the census 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.

“There was one hillside,” he said, “where a bunch of people were sitting around. A carload of enumerators drove by, yelling, “how many are there up there?”

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.

“No one was hurt,” he said. “We are happy about the turnout,” Reeder said at a press conference Wednesday.

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, on Wednesday 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 did say that census takers would return Wednesday night to a few places, among them Cleveland and Washington, where they were not able to finish their work Tuesday night.

Bryant’s confidence in the count came under fire from some quarters, although there was evidence 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 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.

In New Orleans, one of the five cities chosen for an assessment by the Census Bureau, the homeless census was reported to have gone fairly well.

“I’d say many of the homeless were indeed enumerated. Some were not,” said James Wright, a professor of sociology at Tulane University who headed a 61-member assessment team.

In New York City, where 121 observers were dispatched to places favored by the city’s teeming homeless population, “80% to 90% of the observers saw census enumerators interviewing homeless people,” said Jude Travers-Frazier, who was part of the assessment effort.

But for many census takers, the Tuesday night experience was one of fear and frustration.

“I was scared driving down there (to a Detroit census office),” said Darlean Brownies, “and I thought ‘please God, don’t send me to an abandoned building.’ ”

With less than 100 census takers working in Detroit, only two of the city’s myriad abandoned homes were canvassed.

Three census workers fled the sound of gunfire early Wednesday morning as they approached a Brooklyn apartment building where they had hoped to interview homeless people nearby and inside. Census Director Bryant said the three resumed their work 10 minutes later.

“You can assume it was a warning shot,” she said.

In the Ft. Lauderdale incident, the two census workers were robbed of a watch, a ring and a small amount of cash, according to Rhea Faberman, a spokeswoman for the Census Bureau.

In Houston, a team of three enumerators quickly found themselves the targets of bottles, shoes and other blunt objects as they tried to approach a group of sleeping men on the columned porch of an abandoned building. As one of the census workers tried to reason with the men on the porch, one of them began swinging a baseball bat menacingly.

Census takers at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park didn’t have much luck when they tried to lure people sleeping in the bushes by calling out to them from the sidewalk and promising that they were not the police.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers 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 and Ann Rovin in Denver, and Jim Herron-Zamora in San Francisco.