Test Run Helps Find Census’ Shortcomings

It’s just one snapshot of a bigger, more complex portrait, but a recent count of homeless people in six Los Angeles census tracts identified 192 people. In five of those tracts, no street people were found nearly 10 years ago, a city report released Wednesday showed.

Results from this “practice run” for next year’s census prove that the elusive hidden homeless who are not in shelters or on skid row represent one of the biggest challenges in the 2000 count, city officials and homeless advocates said.

But capturing enough of those snapshots to assemble an accurate portrait is a mind-numbing task for the U.S. Census Bureau, officials said.

“This county is enormous,” said Natalie Profant, planning manager for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. “The Census Bureau needs all the help it can get.”

The city and social service agencies are hard pressed to prevent a repeat of the 1990 census--the first time a count of street homeless was attempted. The undercount of the homeless then resulted in lost funding for social services, shelters and other agencies, they said.

The 1990 census tallied 7,706 homeless in Los Angeles and 11,790 in the county. But a 1991 report by the Shelter Partnership, a support organization for shelters and homeless programs, estimated that at least 36,800 people--and possibly as many as 59,100--were homeless each night in L.A. County. More than half were in the city of Los Angeles, the study said.

The March 25 demonstration project, organized by city and social service agencies, sent teams of outreach workers to parks, freeway embankments, alleys and other areas to survey the homeless from 5 p.m. to midnight.

From that survey, the report listed several findings that might improve next year’s tally:

* Conduct a count during hours that will find the largest number of homeless at a time when they would be most inclined to complete surveys, which ask about income, race and education. Much of the 1990 street count occurred between 2 and 4 a.m., a disruptive timefor anyone, experts said.

* Conduct the count when city shelters are still open for the winter.

* Continue to hire more homeless agency workers and homeless people, who are better able to ferret out hard-to-find encampments and obscure locations that might intimidate many census workers.

* Use incentives, such as toiletries and sack lunches, to get street people to talk with census workers.

At Wednesday’s meeting, several officials suggested that outside funding be used, perhaps from the city or federal government, to hire homeless people and outreach workers as census counters.

John Reeder, regional director for the U.S. Census Bureau, said that next year’s homeless count would not be scheduled so early in the morning, but that the national office would have to determine whether outside funding could be used to hire more census workers.

All census counters have to pass security checks, and liability concerns may preclude the bureau from using supplemental workers, he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Homeless Population

On March 25, a homeless population that was not identified in the 1990 census was found in five of the six specific census tracts where teams of outreach workers conducted test counts.

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Community Census tract # Outreach team count 1990 Census count Westlake 2094.01 50 0 South Central 2392.00 47 0 Chinatown 2071.00 40 115 Van Nuys 1832.00 8 0 Boyle Heights 2046.00 25 0 Venice 2735.00 22 0

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