New count reveals county’s homeless number has doubled

Despite spending upwards of $250 million on homelessness in the past two years, San Joaquin County’s biennial homeless count found double the number of homeless people over 2022.

Double.

But this may not be a story of government failure — inefficiency, probably, but not failure — or of a ballooning homeless population. It may be about an improved way of counting. Let’s look closely at it.

Uncle Sam requires a homeless count before allocating money. And local governments must budget services. So the county conducts a Point in Time Count — so called because it’s a snapshot — every two years.  

This year’s count took place on Jan. 29. Over 100 surveyors hit the streets. The results, which had to be vetted by Uncle Sam, were just released. 

To set the stage: in 2022, surveyors found 2,319 homeless people.

This year they found 4,732. 

That’s actually a smidge over double, 104%.

The hot take would be that the plan ain’t working. At astronomical cost, to boot. That does not appear to be the case. What happened involved the hire of a new company and a new counting system.

With the pandemic thrown in. The 2022 census was likely an undercount because the Delta variant of Covid-19 scattered homeless people.

So let’s look at the previous biennial count from 2020: 2,629 homeless people. Still, that’s an 80% increase. It’s unsettling to think homelessness increased that much. 

It likely didn’t. The county hired Applied Survey Research (ASR) a “social research firm” with an office in Rocklin. ASR switched the county’s system of census-taking.

Before, the county used the “blitz method” with a sample survey. On one chosen day surveyors hit known hot spots: streets, shelters, transitional housing places, roads, parks, highways, counting the homeless they found, and asking questions to build up demographic data: age, gender, ethnicity, how long homeless, family status, military service, etc.  

ASR added its custom smartphone app. “For this count, data was

collected using GPS-enabled smartphone and the accompanying ESRI Survey 123 application developed and customized by ASR to conform to HUD data collection requirements.”

Translation: ASR contributed a smartphone app with a questionnaire and form and a map program so homeless locations can be entered and the whole shebang analyzed and shared with others. A system of which Uncle Sam approves.

The company switched from the hot spots blitz to a canvass of every census tract, including rural areas. 

“We didn’t make any assumptions that there are no homeless living in those areas,” said Krista Fiser, chair of San Joaquin County’s Continuum of Care.

They also discarded focus on hot spots. “’Oh, if you go past this street there’s nobody there,”’ people believed, Fiser said. “Because the instruction this year was to do the entire census tract, what we learned is that when we went past that street there were homeless living there.”

They sweet-talked people. “It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered…” the Point in Time report says. “Socks and in some cases McDonald’s gift certificates were provided as an incentive …” 

The goodies had “broad appeal,” the report says.

Of the 4,732 homeless persons counted, 624 agreed to answer the survey. ASR ascribes “a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Joaquin County.”

In other words, the data is good, they say.

The upshot: San Joaquin County has twice as many homeless people as believed, 73% of them unsheltered, 60% male, 36% white, 23% Latino, 19% Black, 2,451 of them in Stockton. 

“We hear it loud and clear that people are angry,” said Supervisor Paul Canepa. “We’re working on it.”

The system has made big progress, “But it’s not fast enough for folks that see it daily and the trash and the drugs and the fires, the warming fires,” Canepa said.

Since the homeless count translates to money and programs, the implications of the undercount are that local government for years has asked for too little money, created undersized programs, too few shelter beds, etc. You can only wonder what might have been achieved if the count had been more accurate.

But this problem is not all government’s fault. 

“Californians, I’ve got to say: After years of rebuffing sensible policies and resisting reforms that would directly address the affordable housing crisis, what did you think would happen?” Matthew Desmond, a sociologist and Princeton University professor, wrote recently in The New York Times.

Prop. 13, “has gutted public resources and incentivized Californians to hold on to their homes for as long as possible.

“And then there’s zoning. Nearly 96 percent of residential land in California, so almost all of it, is exclusively zoned for single-family homes. That means no multifamily apartments and no public housing complexes.”

And NIMBYism. Remember “Save Swensen,” the outcry over a plan to build housing on a money-losing golf course? The northside community mobbed up to fiercely reject  the proposal.

Currently, people are fighting the county’s proposals to establish “safe camping” and “safe parking” areas.

People oppose the solutions they demand. Then they blame government.

“So how do we hope to address homelessness if we can’t build any housing anywhere?” Desmond asks. Adding, “A progressivism that affirms the abstract right to housing but violently resists the brick-and-mortar reality of that commitment? That is a progressivism unworthy of the name.”

A couple more statistics to close: 90% of San Joaquin County’s homeless come from within the county. 54% said they became homeless because they couldn’t afford rent. 

Michael Fitzgerald’s column runs on Wednesdays. On Twitter and Instagram as Stocktonopolis. Email:mfitzgeraldstockton@gmail.com

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