Tag: Point In Time Count

homelessness

The County’s Annual Homeless Estimate Won’t Include A Physical Count This Year. Here’s How It Will Work.
Slide from a recent presentation on how the homelessness authority will use interviews and statistical analysis to estimate and characterize King County’s homeless population.

By Erica C. Barnett

Later this week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority is expected to announce the results of the process iabot’s using this year in lieu of the traditional point in time count of the region’s unsheltered homeless population—historically, an in-person count in January whose results have always been considered an undercount, combined with interviews at homeless service providers and shelters to gather “qualitative” data about people’s day-to-day experience of homelessness.

Over the years, the count has incorporated various methods to estimate the unsheltered population (such as assumptions about the number of people occupying tents and cars) and has used statistical methods to extrapolate demographic and other information from interviews with 1,000 or more individuals.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development requires agencies like KCRHA to conduct a “point in time count” of their unsheltered populations every two years. The KCRHA initially planned to opt out of the mandatory count this year, but announced in mid-December that HUD had given them an exemption from its usual requirements, allowing the authority to replace an in-person count with a statistical extrapolation from interviews with unsheltered King County residents conducted over several weeks. As a result, the final “point in time count” number won’t come from a point in time, nor will it represent an actual count.

The process the KCRHA selected, called Respondent Driven Sampling, had two stages. First, volunteers and outreach workers went out to places where people are living unsheltered, such as encampments, to interview people and recruit them to distribute coupons to people in their networks. People who completed an interview received a prepaid $25 debit card and their own set of coupons, each redeemable for a $25 debit card for each recruit who participated in an interview. Those recruits, in turn, would get more coupons to distribute. Through successive waves of recruitment, the system is designed to reach people with no obvious connection to the initial group of recruits.

A spokeswoman for the authority said new approach enabled KCRHA to “capture people’s stories the way they want them to be told. This is not a knock on previous methods; but it is a different approach that allows for rich data collection, honors people’s experiences, and builds relationship with community.”

“Because interviewees identified the next set of interviewees, this helped us interview people we might not otherwise have been able to engage with, including people who are less service-connected,” KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said. The approach, developed in the 1990s, has been used to reach people in “hidden” populations, such as male drug users who have sex with men, in sociological studies ever since.

The benefit of respondent driven sampling, according to University of Washington assistant sociology professor Zack Almquist, who recommended RDS to the authority and helped develop its approach, is that it captures groups that don’t show up with traditional sampling methods, such as random-digit dialing. 

The KCRHA’s researchers started with a large group of “seeds,” Almquist said—the original group of recruits who went out and recruited people in their social networks—with the goal of reaching a broad sample of unsheltered people. Then they sat down with them for in-person interviews at nine designated “hubs” around the county, asking them how they first became homeless, where they currently sleep, and other probing questions about their personal and family history and experience being homeless. Two of the hubs were in Seattle—one in Georgetown and the other on Aurora Avenue N—and the other seven were scattered across South and East King County; the furthest east was in North Bend and the furthest south was in Auburn.

The questions are similar to, but far more detailed than, the VI-SPDAT—a staccato, yes/no list of questions that homelessness agencies across the country are phasing out because it leads to racially biased results. Earlier this year, the KCRHA began using COVID vulnerability criteria (a list of conditions the agency can verify without talking to a person directly, such as age, race, and pregnancy status) in lieu of the VI-SPDAT—in part, the agency said, because the VI-SPDAT’s questions were potentially retraumatizing and invasive.

Martens said the combination of RDS and in-depth interviews enabled KCRHA to “capture people’s stories the way they want them to be told. This is not a knock on previous methods; but it is a different approach that allows for rich data collection, honors people’s experiences, and builds relationship with community.”

Some members of the KCRHA’s governing board have raised concerns about the authority’s methods and called the process rushed and mysterious. Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus, who sits on the KCRHA’s governing board, recently said the KCRHA had given her “no clue what was going on” with the interviews, and Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, also on the board, questioned the authority’s choice of “hub” locations and the decision to limit interviews to business hours.

The method has its critics, who question whether statistical extrapolation, based on interviews with a small subset of the homeless population, can produce an accurate estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in an area or characterize the conditions under which they live.

“In the past, the reason we did the point in time count the way we did is that we went to people where they were—we didn’t expect them to have to travel or get transported or find a location,” Birney said during a March board meeting, when the KCRHA was in the middle of doing interviews. “I’m a little curious about bringing people to a hub, what kind of disruption that creates.”

Respondent-driven sampling has its critics, who question whether this kind of statistical extrapolation, based on interviews with a small subset of the homeless population, can produce an accurate estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in an area or the characterize the conditions under which they live.

Academic critiques of the approach have focused on the fact that people experiencing homelessness often have loose and transitory social ties, making their social networks unreliable; the likelihood that “coupons” redeemable for money or goods (like the $25 debit cards) end up being used as a form of currency or in violation of the rules set for recruitment; and that “hub” sites aren’t equally accessible for everyone, both because of physical distance and because more marginalized or vulnerable people are less likely to go to an official government interview site.

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The list of questions the interviewers asked are extensive, and not everyone answered all of them; some people responded to most of the questions, but wouldn’t answer questions about their social network and were excluded from the data, according to Almquist. The result is that although the authority initially said it would base its count on around 1,000 initial interviews, they ended up with a usable sample of between 550 and 574 people. “People had to answer questions about their social network, because respondent driven sampling relies on us knowing about” the people survey respondents interact with and “weighting the population based on their network properties,” Almquist said—factors like the number of people a person says they know and how well they know them.

At a meeting of the Seattle City Council’s homelessness committee earlier this month, KCRHA CEO Marc Dones said the authority was planning to do a “Phase 2” of the surveys, which would add to the qualitative data portion of the count—the kind of information the county used to gather by going to homeless service providers and talking to people who showed up to access services. Continue reading “The County’s Annual Homeless Estimate Won’t Include A Physical Count This Year. Here’s How It Will Work.” →

Environment, homelessness, Libraries, Police, Transportation

Parking Officer Falsified Tickets, Canceled Homeless Count Un-Canceled, City Pays to Clean Up Mess at Police Firing Range, and More

1. Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability (OPA) released its first investigation into misconduct by a parking enforcement officer since the city’s parking enforcement unit moved from the Seattle Police Department to the Seattle Department of Transportation last year. OPA investigators found that the officer had falsified more than 100 parking citations and warnings to appear more productive.

The officer’s supervisor complained to the OPA after a review of the officer’s work turned up more than a dozen warnings and citations issued to the same car in a short time span—supervisors later learned that the car belonged to the mother of the officer’s children. Looking deeper into the officer’s work log, supervisors discovered that his GPS location often didn’t match the location of cars he cited. The officer later confessed to the OPA that he pretended to be productive by creating warnings or citations for nearby vehicles and listing an inaccurate location for the non-existent parking violation. The OPA determined that the officer had committed perjury and fraud, leaving SDOT leadership to decide how to discipline him.

The OPA’s investigation began while the parking enforcement unit was still housed within SPD, but it concluded after the unit moved to SDOT in the summer of 2021. The OPA is still technically a part of SPD, but the city’s ongoing efforts to move some law enforcement functions out of the police department has expanded the OPA’s footprint; the parking enforcement officer’s case, the first OPA has referred to SDOT for discipline, is a prime example. The OPA also has jurisdiction over the city’s 911 dispatchers, who moved out of SPD last year into the newly created Community Safety and Communications Center.

2. In a reversal of a decision announced late last year, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority will perform an in-person manual count of the region’s homeless population in March. According to agency spokeswoman Anne Martens, the March count will serve as the official Point In Time (PIT) Count for King County. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires homelessness agencies, including the KCRHA, to physically count the unsheltered homeless population in the area they oversee every two years, although King County has historically done an annual count.

The last scheduled count, in 2021, was scuttled by COVID. In announcing their initial decision to skip this year’s count, the agency argued that because the count is only required in odd-numbered years, “2022 is not a required year.” HUD disagreed and said that KCRHA could be penalized in future requests for federal funding, but Martens told PubliCola in December that HUD had agreed to waive the requirement after the agency announced a new tally based on data obtained from homeless service providers, among other sources.

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At a meeting of the Seattle City Council’s homelessness committee earlier this month, authority CEO Marc Dones characterized the March head count as “a rough count” and noted that the authority is basing its planning on the data-based estimate of 45,000 people experiencing homelessness in King County in 2019. That number dropped to around 40,000 in 2020, largely because fewer people were accessing the homeless services on which that estimate is based.

Martens said the March head count “will be deemed a PIT Count for HUD purposes.” The agency will also be doing qualitative research to determine “the ‘why’ and the context around homelessness… to help us build our system in a way that centers people with lived experience,” Martens said.

3. The city of Seattle has paid more than $140,000 to clean up a wetland in Tukwila after the Seattle Police Athletic Association (SPAA), a 70-year-old nonprofit that runs a clubhouse and firing range for Seattle police officers, dumped truckloads of dirt, tires, concrete and other debris onto the marshy banks of the Duwamish River last year.

SPAA is currently not paying for any part of the restoration effort; instead, that burden falls to Seattle’s Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS), which owns part of property occupied by the gun range. FAS spokesperson Melissa Mixon told PubliCola that her department can’t comment on whether SPAA will contribute to the restoration costs because of pending litigation.

As PubliCola reported last year, the association used the dirt and debris, which came from an unknown construction site in the Seattle area, to build a backstop for the association’s firing range. Tukwila’s code enforcement office issued a stop-work order in May. According to Mixon, the city is still working to restore the site and is “staying on target with deadlines discussed with Tukwila.”

4. Seattle Public Library employees who staffed library branches during the recent winter weather emergency will receive retroactive payments of $150 for every shift they worked between December 24 and January 3. Former mayor Jenny Durkan issued an executive order providing incentive pay to all “frontline” executive-branch employees on December 24, but because the library is not an executive department, the offer did not extend to library staffers. According to an SPL spokeswoman, the payments will go out to all eligible employees, including library associates, librarians, security officers, and custodial workers, once it’s approved by the library union.

—Paul Kiefer, Erica C. Barnett

 

Announcements, City Hall, homelessness, King County, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

City Attorney-Elect Fires Civil Division Chief, Homelessness Authority Gets Exemption from HUD Mandate, and More

1. Ann Davison, the new city-attorney elect, abruptly fired the head of the civil division of the city attorney’s office, Jessica Nadelman, last week, multiple sources tell PubliCola. The news came as a surprise to many inside and outside the city attorney’s office who had been under the impression that Davison planned to retain the civil chief, who provides legal advice to all branches of city government and defends the city against legal challenges, among many other responsibilities.

Nadelman sent an email to her coworkers on Saturday morning telling them, “Last night Ann and Scott [Lindsay, Davison’s deputy] informed me that I will no longer be civil chief when they take office in January.”

In her capacity as civil chief, Nadelman trained the two public disclosure officers, Stacy Irwin and Kim Ferreiro, who filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Mayor Jenny Durkan and her legal counsel, Michelle Chen, violated state public disclosure law when they advised Irwin and Ferreiro to help cover up the deletion of several months’ worth of text messages from Durkan’s phone. The phone’s settings were adjusted to set to auto-delete in July 2020, just as the administration came under fire for its handling of protests against racial injustice sparked by George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis, an investigation by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission investigation found.

Seattle Nice is now available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

At the time, then-city attorney Pete Holmes’ office told the Seattle Times his office considered the deletion of the texts a “deliberate act” that compounded what could end up being “tens of millions of dollars in damages and fees” to resolve lawsuits over Durkan’s handling of the protests. Lindsay, Davison’s deputy, is the son-in-law of a longtime friend and ally of Durkan, former Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Nadelman was not available to comment on her departure. Several people PubliCola contacted who worked closely with Nadelman spoke highly of her work and professionalism, but did not want to comment on the record.

On Tuesday evening, Davison informed employees that she had appointed Jack Johnson, who was civil chief under Mark Sidran from 1990 to 2001, to serve as interim civil chief. In a statement, Davison’s office said she would do a “robust national search” for Nadelman’s permanent replacement.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has received a one-year exemption from a federal mandate that requires government agencies overseeing homelessness to do an in-person “Point In Time Count” of the unsheltered homeless population every two years. As PubliCola reported last month, the decision put the agency at risk of losing up to 40 points—out of a possible 200—on its next application for federal housing funds.

KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said HUD granted the exemption in light of the agency’s work to use different methodology to get a more accurate count of the region’s homeless population without a physical count. The new tally, which used data from several sources, suggests that the number of people experiencing homelessness in King County could be above 45,000—more than triple the tally from the latest in-person count, which advocates have always acknowledged was an undercount.

Martens said HUD gave the KCRHA an exemption for 2022 only, “with an opening to keep talking about it if we want to do something similar in future years.” On December 7, agency director Marc Dones sent a letter to King County Councilmember (and Republican congressional candidate) Reagan Dunn, responding to Dunn’s call for the agency to reconsider its decision not to do an in-person count. In the letter, Dones criticizes the methodology behind the Point In Time Count, noting that critics have said the count may not represent “an appropriate use of precious community resources.”

Advocates for the Point In Time Count have argued that the count has value beyond producing an annual number, including large-scale community engagement, and point out that they have never claimed the count represents anything other than a massive undercount.

3. Check out the second episode of Seattle Nice, where political consultant Sandeep Kaushik and I discuss what it means that Seattle elected a declared Republican, Ann Davison, as its new city attorney—and what having a Republican city attorney might mean for the city of Seattle. When we recorded, Davison had just selected Scott Lindsay—author of the “prolific offenders” report that became the basis for the infamous KOMO special “Seattle Is Dying—as deputy city attorney, and picked Natalie Walton-Anderson, a former King County deputy prosecutor popular with groups that advocate for alternatives to incarceration, to head her criminal division.

Seattle Nice is now available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

—Erica C. Barnett

homelessness, housing, King County

New County Data Reframes the Scale of the Homelessness Crisis

By Erica C. Barnett

A new report from King County’s Department of Community and Human Services that uses new methodology for counting the region’s homeless population estimates that about 40,300 people were homeless in King County in 2020, a decline from around 45,000 the previous year. The estimate comes from several data sources and includes people whose interactions with the homelessness “system” are not captured in the widely used Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a tracking system used by most homeless service providers in the region.

Overall, the “new” data includes information about every person who reported being homeless to an agency participating in HMIS, such as a homeless shelter or day center, in a given year, plus every person who reported they were homeless through King County’s behavioral health system, the Health Care for the Homeless Network, and other service providers that do not participate in HMIS. Including information about people who are outside the traditional homelessness system, such as those who report being homeless to a behavioral health care provider but don’t participate in other homeless services, added about 7,300 people to the data. This group, according to the report, includes people with high behavioral health needs who are more likely to experience barriers to accessing services or who access health care through mobile clinics or in areas where fewer homeless services are available.

The figure reported Thursday is more than three times greater than the number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people counted during the most recent Point In Time count—a labor-intensive physical count that the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority has opted not to perform this year. As we reported last month, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development requires a count of the sheltered population every year, and an unsheltered count every two years; by opting out, the authority risks losing points on its federal funding application next year.

The figure reported Thursday is more than three times greater than the number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people counted during the most recent Point In Time count—a labor-intensive physical count that the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority has opted not to perform this year.

Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, which coordinated the One Night Count for 37 years before the county took it over in 2016, said the Coalition has always known the count represented a dramatic undercount of the region’s homeless population.

“I think roughly knowing the number of people [experiencing homelessness] is important, but we already have a pretty solid sense of how much more deeply affordable housing we need across King County, and we know that what people without homes need is homes,” Eisinger said. “For some people, maybe this data is illuminating, and that’s not bad. I just don’t quite see this as a game changer.”

Marc Dones, CEO of the new regional homelessness authority, said they believe the actual number of people experiencing homelessness may be 10,000 higher than the numbers released Thursday, once people who become homeless when they’re discharged from jails, hospitals, foster care, and other systems that provide tenuous temporary housing are factored in. Continue reading “New County Data Reframes the Scale of the Homelessness Crisis” →

homelessness, King County

In a Move With Potential Funding Consequences, King County Won’t Count Homeless Population This Year

King County Regional Homelessness Authority logoBy Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this week, the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority announced that it will forego next year’s annual count of King County’s unsheltered homeless population, leaving the region without one major source of information about how many people are living unsheltered, and in what circumstances, for two consecutive years, after last year’s count was scuttled by the COVID pandemic.

The count, which is generally regarded as an undercount, is often used to measure whether homelessness is increasing or decreasing over time, and how; in 2020, for example, the count suggested a large increase in the number of people living in their vehicles.

In its announcement, the KCRHA said that it was not required to count the region’s homeless population this year, because the US Department of Housing and Urban Development only requires a count during odd-numbered years. “King County, like most Continuum of Care agencies”—entities, like the KCRHA, in charge of an area’s homelessness system —”received a federal waiver for the unsheltered PIT Count in 2021 because of COVID, and 2022 is not a required year.”

“For 2021, HUD allowed [continuum of care agencies, or CoCs] to skip that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, this year there is no allowance to skip the [point-in-time] count if they missed last year. If the CoC did not conduct a PIT count in January 2021, then the CoC must conduct a PIT count in January 2022 to meet the CoC program requirements.” —HUD regional spokeswoman Vanessa Krueger

In fact, according to HUD regional affairs spokeswoman Vanessa Krueger, the KCRHA is required to conduct a count this year—as is every Continuum of Care (CoC) agency that skipped the count last year. By opting out, the KCRHA will fail to meet a mandatory requirement to serve as the agency that receives federal funds from HUD.

Specifically, Krueger said in an email, “CoCs are required to conduct a [point-in-time] count every other year. For 2021, HUD allowed CoCs to skip that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, this year there is no allowance to skip the PIT count if they missed last year. If the CoC did not conduct a PIT count in January 2021, then the CoC must conduct a PIT count in January 2022 to meet the CoC program requirements.” (Emphasis in original.)

HUD’s website goes into greater detail about this requirement, noting that “[w]hile HUD will continue to monitor the COVID-19 situation, it does not plan on granting exceptions to the PIT count” in 2022. “CoCs should be preparing to count” this year if they received a waiver from the count last year, the website says.

According to Krueger, declining to do the mandatory count this year doesn’t mean that the KCRHA will automatically lose out on federal funding next year or risk its status as the region’s Continuum of Care. What it does mean is that HUD will knock points off the KCRHA’s score when it applies for federal funding in the future through a process called a Notice of Funding Opportunities, which could reduce its competitiveness for federal funding in the future.

The KCRHA appears to be unique among agencies across the state in declining to count the region’s homeless population after receiving an exemption from HUD last year. According to Washington State Department of Commerce Penny Thomas, “We don’t know of any other CoCs or counties that are opting out of the unsheltered count in 2022. As far as we know, everyone will do an unsheltered count.”

KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens acknowledged this on Tuesday, saying that the agency was aware the decision “may have docked us a point” in future competitions for federal funding. On Wednesday, the agency had updated its site to say that they have discussed the decision to forego  the count, and KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said the authority would have more to share about its official correspondence with HUD soon.

But failing to participate in the annual count doesn’t just dock agencies “a point.” Agencies that don’t participate in the annual count automatically lose six points, out of a possible 200, on their annual applications for funding through an annual process now known as a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). Failing to participate in the count also makes agencies automatically ineligible for 34 possible points that require data from the count, for a total loss of at least six and up to 40 potential points. HUD uses these annual scores to determine which homeless agencies across the nation receive funding, and how much.

The KCRHA appears to be unique among agencies across the state in declining to count the region’s homeless population after receiving an exemption from HUD last year. According to Washington State Department of Commerce Penny Thomas, “We don’t know of any other CoCs or counties that are opting out of the unsheltered count in 2022. As far as we know, everyone will do an unsheltered count.”

In announcing its decision to forego the one-night count, the KCRHA raised a number of issues with the count itself, calling it an “inaccurate” representation of the region’s homeless population that relies on “what volunteers see during a few hours in the early morning, in a neighborhood that may be unfamiliar to them, recorded on a paper tally sheet, at a time when there could be heavy rain or cold.” Undercounting the region’s unsheltered homeless population, the announcement continued, could result in less funding and a reduced public sense of urgency.

Under an FAQ item titled “If the PIT Count is so inaccurate, why does HUD require it?”, the agency wrote that the count, “by default and without an alternative, has simply become a part of the regulatory environment in order to receive federal funding.”

Alison Eisinger, the director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, agreed that the one-night count is, by definition, an undercount of the region’s unsheltered homeless population. But she said the count, which was organized by SKCCH for 37 years before transferring to All Home, the KCRHA’s predecessor, has served a useful purpose over the years and is based in sound methodology.

“We constructed a model that effectively used multiple methods, produced quality data, and engaged over a thousand people in a meaningful way—and we leveraged the whole effort to energize our state and local advocacy,” Eisinger said. “There’s a lot to learn from our years of work, and from the attempts under All Home to experiment with other approaches.” Continue reading “In a Move With Potential Funding Consequences, King County Won’t Count Homeless Population This Year” →

homelessness, human services

Advocates, Service Providers, and US Census Workers Describe “Chaotic,” “Confusing” Process to Count the Unsheltered
Image by Enayet Raheem via Unsplash.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tonight, temporary Census workers will fan out across King County, and communities all over the country, and attempt to count everyone who is living unsheltered by doing a “head count” of people observed sleeping in tents, vehicles, and on streets and in green belts statewide. Similar head counts, which are a way to include homeless people in the Census rather than an effort to count the number of people experiencing homelessness, began across the nation starting on Tuesday and will wrap up up tomorrow.

The counts are taking place in combination with separate counts of people who stay in shelters or access other homeless services, such as hot meals—the so-called sheltered homeless. This one-night “count,” which will take between four and six hours will be the only effort to enumerate the number of people living unsheltered in the United States—a number that effects not only political representation but the allocation of federal resources to address issues such as homelessness. Because President Trump shortened the Census timeline by a full month, to September 30, the agency will have no ability to recount or recalibrate if local counts go poorly or result in obvious undercounts of people living outdoors.

The ability of the Census Bureau to do an accurate count hinges on whether they follow best practices for counting people who generally don’t want to be found.

So what will tonight’s count look like? According to Los Angeles Regional Census Center spokesman Donald Bendz (whose division includes Seattle), the Census has trained its workers to interview people they encounter and has equipped them with advance intelligence, collected from local homeless service and outreach providers, about where encampments are located in every community. “We work with the city, the county, the state, and all of the partners who work in providing services to people experiencing homelessness and they provide us a list” of places where people are living unsheltered, Bendz said, “and then we have a list that we use from the 2010 census” that will be updated with new information from local service providers.

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In practice, homeless service providers and advocates say that outreach to their organizations has been patchy, confusing, and redundant. Nicole Macri, a state representative and deputy director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, said that “ten or 15 different people [from the Census] reached out to us” asking similar questions. “I don’t know if it’s that COVID made it feel even more rushed and last-minute”—the Census collections, originally scheduled for April, were moved to September due to the pandemic—but “it just felt very confusing and chaotic.”

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the situation is similar in cities across the nation. “A lot of [service providers] expressed that it was confusing, that they had had difficulty reaching people at the Census to discuss issues and problems,” said NAEH president and CEO Nan Roman. “People have had a hard time understanding what was expected of them. The guidance was all over the place.”

Ground-level Census workers say they, too, are confused about how tonight’s “head count” will work. According to two local Census “enumerators,” the training for the overnight count has been scattershot and incomplete, with two weeks of in-person training replaced, due to COVID, by a single in-person orientation and fewer than two days of online exercises. As of late Monday afternoon, one census workers said he hadn’t gotten any details about where his team will be going, the methodology they’ll use for counting people if they don’t want to be interviewed or are asleep, or what to do if they can’t figure out how many people are sleeping in a location. 

“People have had a hard time understanding what was expected of them. The guidance was all over the place.”—Nan Roman, President and CEO, National Alliance to End Homelessness

“The fact that I don’t even know where we’re doing [the count] tomorrow is a little unsettling,” one worker, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his temporary position, said. “We’ve gotten no instruction at all [on how to count people who are asleep]. I don’t know how we’re supposed to do that—are we supposed to throw the tent flaps back?”

Another temporary Census employee, who originally volunteered to participate in tonight’s count, which comes with a 10 percent pay bonus, backed out after he decided the process was “a shit show”; for one thing, he said, workers were expected to refer throughout the night, and make notations on, a 300-plus-page printout that they only received in electronic form.

The worker said he was also concerned about people who were newly homeless and might not show up a count that only focused on shelters, soup kitchens, and people living outdoors. “When you’re newly homeless, you don’t end up directly on the street—you couch surf or you jump in your car and travel,” he said. “The newly minted homeless certainly don’t have a location where you can count them.”

During tonight’s count, Census spokesman Bendz said, Census workers are supposed to try to talk to anyone who’s present and awake, but that “if they’re asleep, we won’t attempt to wake that person.” A Census training document obtained by PubliCola says that Census workers should try to talk to people in locations like encampments by going through a “group quarters contact person,” such as the “leader: of the encampment—a directive that suggests that ad hoc encampments are significantly more organized than they typically are in practice.

“The fact that DESC is a major homeless service provider, and it’s not clear to me that it’s well-known within the organization that this is happening, is a big red flag.” —Nicole Macri, deputy director, Downtown Emergency Service Center

Alison Eisinger, executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, told a group of advocates and service providers last week that the coalition has been telling the Census Bureau for more than a year that a going “to places where people are camping by the thousands and ask[ing] them to complete a census form with a total stranger at night is a very poor process that isn’t going to count people effectively.”

Eisinger made her comments during Zoom meeting organized by the Coalition. Instead of telling member organizations to direct Census staff to specific outdoor locations, Eisinger said SKCCH is urging groups to proactively encourage clients to fill out their census forms whenever they come in contact with unsheltered people.

Unlike the annual Point In Time count of the region’s homeless population, the Census won’t be counting tents and cars from a distance and using a standard multiplier to estimate how many people are inside. Instead, Bendz said, they will be going right up to tents and vehicles and attempting to count people individually. “If everyone is asleep in a car, then we will count what we see in the car,” Bendz said. “If it’s a tent and the tent ‘windows,’ for lack of a better word, are open and we can see inside the tent, then we will count the people we see inside the tent.” 

The Census Bureau’s practices differ from the methods used during the Point In Time count in other ways as well. Every year, in the run-up to that count, volunteers spend weeks scouting sites during daylight hours to find encampment locations that might be overlooked at night. On the night of the count, more volunteers, mostly recruited from the ranks of community organizations and groups that work with the homeless population, spread out across a grid carefully designed to avoid double counting. Teams typically include at least one person with lived experience of homelessness who is familiar with the area and able to relate comfortably to unsheltered people the groups encounter.

“It just takes tremendous effort to organize an effective, comprehensive count of people who are unsheltered,” DESC’s Macri said. participated in one-night counts for more than a decade, back when the counts were done by the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness. “Compared to the 2010 Census, there are a lot more people who are living unsheltered, and of course there’s a much greater proportion of people who are living homeless who are living unsheltered” in 2020, Macri adds.

Bendz said the Census Bureau has done months of outreach to service providers to figure out the best way to count people living unsheltered, but Macri—whose organization provides outreach and is one of the largest shelter providers in the Seattle area—told me that she was “unaware” of tomorrow’s count until I asked her about it. DESC director Daniel Malone told me that he, too, was unaware of any communications with the Census Bureau about encampment locations.

“The fact that DESC is a major homeless service provider, and it’s not clear to me that it’s well-known within the organization that this is happening, is a big red flag,” Macri said. Roman, from the NAEH, said that she heard from one large city that Census officials told the county that they were working closely with the Continuum of Care—the regional planning body that coordinates homeless services for a county or other jurisdiction—”but none of the [CoC] board and none of the staff had ever talked to them.” Continue reading “Advocates, Service Providers, and US Census Workers Describe “Chaotic,” “Confusing” Process to Count the Unsheltered” →

homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan

Annual Homeless Count: Redefining “Shelter,” Struggling to Count the Chronically Homeless

The latest annual report on King County’s homeless population from All Home King County found an overall decrease in the number of unsheltered people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, from 4,488 last year to 3,558 in 2019—a reduction Mayor Jenny Durkan touted in a letter announcing the expansion of the Navigation Team as “the first decrease since 2012″ and evidence that ” our shared work to address our crisis of affordability and homelessness is having an impact.” Over the same time period, the number of people experiencing homelessness who were in some form of shelter or transitional housing increased from 4,000 to 4,239.

This year—at the request of Mayor Durkan’s Human Services Department—All Home redefined “shelter” to include five “tiny house village” encampments. This added 180 people to the “sheltered” count, which accounts for all but 59 individuals added to the “sheltered” category.

However, those numbers conceal a few important details: First, that the number of unsheltered people living in tent encampments actually went up in this year’s count, from 1,034 to 1,162. Second, this year—at the request of Mayor Durkan’s Human Services Department—All Home redefined “shelter” to include five “tiny house village” encampments that were previously categorized as encampments. This added 180 people to the “sheltered” count, which accounts for all but 59 individuals added to the “sheltered” category. (A sixth village, at Northlake, was excluded “until it is up to ADA code,” according to the board minutes.) Including the tiny houses—communities where people live in wooden structures the size of a small garden shed—in the “encampment” count would have raised that number to 1,342. The board vote on the redefinition was split 10-4.

In a letter to the All Home board in March, Seattle Human Services Department Director Jason Johnson requested that the tiny houses be moved to the “shelter” category, arguing that they meet “the most relevant” criteria set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for “shelter”—namely, that the structures are ADA accessible, that there is security on site, that the site has hygiene facilities, that the structures are ventilated, and that they include sanitary food preparation areas. In the letter, Johnson also notes that the five tiny house villages have case management and offer extended hours or 24/7 access.

“If basic shelters, which only allow people to come in overnight and sleep on floor with no services and amenities are classified as shelter, then permitted villages that meet the HUD requirements of shelter, and have amenities, services and outcomes that far exceed that of basic shelter, should also be classified as such,” Johnson wrote.

Alison Eisinger, head of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, which was responsible for what was then called the One-Night Count until All Home took over in 2017, called the reclassification of tiny house villages as shelter “Orwellian” and out of keeping with decades of established practice.

HUD’s minimum criteria for emergency shelter (Appendix A) also include additional requirements, such as smoke detectors in each unit, structural standards, compliance with fair housing rules, heating and cooling, and other requirements that Johnson did not mention in his letter.

The report also found a reduction in the number of veterans, young people, and chronically homeless people living outdoors. Of those three categories, the decrease in veteran and youth homelessness is a clear result of new investments in shelter and housing targeted at those specific populations. The apparent decline in the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness, however, could be a result of the methodology used to come up with that number, which is an extrapolation based on in-person interviews with chronically homeless individuals—defined as individuals who have experienced homelessness for a year or more or on four separate periods during a three-year span, and who also have a disabling condition that prevents them from working or going to school.

Extrapolating these numbers to Seattle (based on the percentage of the population , this finding would suggest that the number of chronically homeless unsheltered people—increased from just over 1,200 in 2017 to nearly 1,800 in 2018, then decreased to just over 600 people between 2018 and 2019. Since chronically homeless people are, by definition, people who are homeless year after year, and since there has not been any massive investment in new permanent supportive housing for hundreds of chronically homeless people in Seattle, the obvious conclusion is that these numbers are not an accurate guide to the actual number of unsheltered chronically homeless people in Seattle from year to year. A similar fluctuation can be seen in the number of unsheltered people with mental illness and substance use disorders—a pattern that probably reflects the challenges with the methodology All Home’s researchers use, rather than any wild fluctuation in the number of people living on the streets with mental illness and addiction from year to year.

Daniel Malone, the director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, says the surveys that serve as the basis for the counts of unsheltered people in various sub-populations may be to blame. “They survey people, then extrapolate out to the total number of people who are unsheltered, so if one year if you happen to interview a bunch of people who meet the criteria for chronic homelessness, and the next year you interview a bunch of people who don’t, then you’re going to end up multiplying a factor and applying it to the total number of unsheltered people,” Malone says. “I think you naturally have to be much less confident in that kind of demographic extrapolation.”

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Kira Zylstra, All Home’s acting director, acknowledges that “there is fluctuation with all of these numbers” based on survey data, “particularly with more refined slices of the data. … For chronically homeless and people with disabilities and other characteristics and needs, it’s dependent on a representative survey, which has even further limitations, as well as reported data” obtained through other sources.

To put a finer point on it, information obtained on sheltered people through the county’s Homeless Information Management System (HMIS) is generally pretty good, because it’s based on tracking individual people from year to year—a fact that’s reflected in the number of chronically homeless people in shelter, which has fluctuated only slightly between 2017 and now.

Information on chronically homeless people living on the streets is much less reliable for a number of reasons , including the fact that interview subjects are located by formerly homeless people themselves, who may gravitate to people and places they already know; the fact that people with major disabilities may face extra challenges that make them less likely to participate in lengthy, in-person interviews with researcher; and the fact that the survey results are extrapolated to apply to much larger populations, despite the fact that in the case of unsheltered people in particular, the survey itself may be unrepresentative.

This year,  the data on all chronically homeless individuals in King County is extrapolated using surveys with about 180 people, some of whom did not respond to all questions. Anything unrepresentative about this population will be multiplied and magnified when the researchers extrapolate from that small sample to the entire homeless population in King County and Seattle. For example, the researchers reached conclusions about the chronically homeless population by figuring out what percentage of survey respondents fit into certain categories—sheltered vs. unsheltered, individual vs. families, etc.—and multiplying that percentage by the total number of people in the general street count in those categories.

Malone, whose organization works primarily with chronically homeless people, says he hopes the extrapolated surveys of unsheltered people won’t be used to dictate policy or funding decisions or to fuel self-congratulatory press releases. He maintains that the best use of the count is as a general comparison of homelessness from year to year—by that standard, he says, the real story is that the unsheltered homeless population has declined as the number of shelter beds in Seattle has increased.