"It's 2026, and you can play Doom II on a small computer you keep in your pocket that's far, far more powerful than the mainframes that directed Apollo 11 to the moon and back. But in cities across the nation, do-gooders and professionals are preparing for that ritual known as the homeless point-in-time count, where they will venture out to tally homeless people by wandering around city streets with clipboards, manually counting anyone who, say, looks like Jack Dorsey."
"San Francisco's next count is coming on Jan. 29. It is a ritual with some purpose, in that it is necessary to do this to receive federal funds. But the tally is done using methods that would've been standard operating procedure during the crafting of the Domesday Book. Adding to the anachronistic nature of it all, this is done every other year."
City officials continue to rely on infrequent, manual point-in-time counts to secure federal funding for homelessness programs. Volunteers walk city streets with clipboards to tally people who appear homeless, producing frequent misclassification and ambiguity about who is actually unsheltered. San Francisco will shift its count hours from evening to early morning and require counters to converse with people they tally. Conversations should improve differentiation between unsheltered individuals and housed SRO residents who spend time outdoors. Those procedural tweaks may reduce some errors but do not modernize the fundamentally antiquated methodology or its biennial cadence.
Read at Mission Local
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