Efforts to Count – and Discount – our Homeless Neighbors

By Megan Wachspress, HAC Board Treasurer

In January of this year, a fellow HAC Board member and I volunteered to assist with the Alameda County 2024 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count.¹ The goal of the PIT Count – which takes place in communities across the nation through the auspices of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development – is to determine the number of individuals “experiencing homelessness” in Alameda County. Because individuals move in and out of homelessness, the approach taken by the survey is to attempt to determine the number of homeless individuals in an area at one point in time and more-or-less assume this is representative of the number of folks without a stable place to stay over the course of the year. To carry out this count, shelters report the number of people staying with them on a given night. That same night, to count “unsheltered” homeless (those in tents and RVs and doorsteps), the county representatives hit the streets.

How the HUD Bi-annual Point-in-Time Count Works

Under the supervision of city and county staff, volunteers are assigned a geographic area (in my case, a rectangle roughly a quarter-mile on two sides and a half-mile on the others), download a smartphone app containing the survey questions and a way to input data, and meet at 4:00am to walk block-by-block, in pairs or small groups. Volunteers are instructed to identify any vehicles or tents that they reasonably believe someone is sleeping in, as well as any entirely unprotected folks, and attempt to speak to the individuals inside or sleeping on the ground. If the individuals do not respond – either because they are asleep or simply choose not to answer – volunteers record their existence; otherwise, we were asked to try and get as much information as we could by asking a series of questions, exactly as written in the app, about their age, gender, race, disability status, past residences, and other personal characteristics and history.

I felt a lot of responsibility for my role in the count. Under federal law, counties must conduct point-in-time counts only every two years. The count – and the information we were able to get from the folks willing and able to speak to us – will be the basis for all the statistics quoted by media over the next two years. In addition, the amount of funding for homelessness programs will be determined, in part, by the count. Countless policy decisions will be predicated on the accuracy of the survey results that I and dozens of other briefly-trained volunteers submitted.

The count is the basis for all the statistics quoted by media over the next two years … Countless policy decisions are predicated on the survey results.

In this way, I became part of producing the “facts” about the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis: the number of unhoused individuals, their demographics, and, of particular political salience, whether “our homeless” were truly “local” – and thus, according to certain politicians and pundits, deserving of services – or had purportedly come to the Bay Area seeking a haven for the homeless and thus could and should be dealt with by being bussed back to where they came from.

Preliminary data for the city of Berkeley reported a significant drop in unsheltered homeless people² based on the PIT Count in which I participated. When the news reports came out I felt a spasm of fear – what if there had been someone sleeping in that vehicle we gingerly tried to peer into with our phone flashlights and we missed them? (We were told to look to see if the windows were steamed up but the morning was damp and foggy and all windows were misted.) Had I failed to count someone?

What if there had been someone sleeping in that vehicle we gingerly tried to peer into with our phone flashlights and we missed them?

My experience of being a “counter” was initially one of intense social anxiety. By design, the count is intended to maximize accuracy by simultaneously identifying people in a relatively short window of time and in the place where they spent the previous night. This meant that in order to get answers to the survey questions, I generally had to wake people up – or at least ask in the direction of a closed tent where someone was likely sleeping, in a voice above conversation level but below shouting, if the person(s) inside, “would be willing to help us with a survey?” And if the person was generous enough with their time to come out to talk, the questions were respectfully phrased but invasive: Do you have someone in that tent with you? What is your race? Do you have a disability? Mental illness? I have previously found phone banking awkward, but disturbing strangers before dawn to ask why they were sleeping in a tent was another level of imposition.

As we walked a methodical path through the pre-dawn stillness, my initial anxiety was replaced by a sense of discovery. Not a happy, exciting one. Rather, one that was deeply sorrowful, but not untouched by a sense of appreciation. By coincidence, I was assigned the immediate neighborhood in which I live for the count. That morning, I was seeing it anew: I focused intensely on parked cars – normally registered as background scenery – as potential homes of last resort. I approached tents tucked into corners of the park where they would be unnoticeable for parents more focused on keeping their kids out of the street. I felt the damp that settled over everything and soaked my shoes when I approached a tent to see if someone was up and willing to talk.

I heard how my fellow counter’s voices and my own carried, how little noise from even well-intentioned morning walkers it took to wake someone desperate for a few more hours of sleep. When we did wake someone, they were unfailingly polite. Despite having no reason at all to give us the time of day – we were given $10 grocery coupons to offer as a thank you – the people we spoke to were all gracious and answered our questions. The last woman we surveyed, after it had already grown light, who had spent the night in a car with her friend, parked along the busiest street in Berkeley, mentioned some administrative challenges she was facing. I suggested she reach out to HAC for help. She already knew all about it, she said. HAC was great; she got her mail there. Of course.

The Impact of the Grants Pass Decision

The Supreme Court issued its Grants Pass decision³ in late June, holding that criminally prosecuting individuals for camping in public spaces did not punish those individuals for their status (i.e., homelessness) and thus did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. For a few years, thanks to a Ninth Circuit decision (Martin v. Boise) by the inimitable Judge Berzon, cities in California and throughout the West Coast had been constitutionally constrained from clearing encampments without demonstrating they had shelter space for those individuals they threatened with arrest. Grants Pass overturned that earlier Berzon decision. (HAC issued a powerful statement⁴ condemning the Grants Pass decision when it was issued).

Grants Pass is cruelly disingenuous. Justice Gorsuch rattles off some generalities purporting to nod to the “complexity” of the homelessness crisis, attempting to establish that he understands that “those experiencing homelessness” are “diverse.” He is clearly at pains to convince himself, and the reader, of his broad-mindedness, that he cares. But the rest of the opinion makes painfully clear what Gorsuch really believes is at stake. There are not homeless people in need of housing, there is the problem of homelessness. Although Justice Gorsuch will not admit it, and although the majority carefully maintains the ruse throughout, it is clear that in the justices’ minds the problem is not a crisis affecting homeless individuals, but the individuals themselves.

In light of this decision, local governments are entitled to criminal citations as a “tool” in the “policy toolbox” to “address” this “problem of homelessness.” Justice Gorsuch makes no attempt to explain what housing, exactly, can be built with the tool of criminal citations, and is carefully silent on what, exactly, will happen to those individuals who cannot or will not move when threatened with this tool. The decision’s rhetoric only makes sense if the problem of homelessness is not something that happens to homeless people, but a problem that homeless people impose on the rest of us – or at least the “us” the Justices care about.

Grants Pass is cruelly disingenuous … in the justices’ minds the problem is not a crisis affecting homeless individuals, but the individuals themselves.

All of this was horrible but predictable. I am a climate attorney, and before that I was a labor attorney, so I am fairly inured to the Court’s political commitments. But the speed and aggression with which California political leadership seized upon the Grants Pass decision took me aback. It shouldn’t have – California’s amicus brief asking the Supreme Court for permission to criminally prosecute homeless people for sleeping in public spaces was quoted extensively in the decision. But the hypocrisy was still stunning.

Here were political leaders who referred to the 6-3 majority in Grants Pass as the “extreme conservative majority”⁵ in other cases implicating personal freedom invoking that majority’s opinion as not just a license, but a mandate to forcibly clear as many homeless people from public areas as quickly as possible. On July 25 Governor Newsom ordered⁶ state agencies to develop “policies” for “address[ing] encampments.” On August 9 he went further, threatening cities and counties with funding cuts if he did not see “results.”⁷

Since the Newsom order and threat, I have been thinking of HAC’s clients, who are entering a new and even more precarious era, now living with the constant threat of forced relocation. Some will, no doubt, face arrest or incarceration for their unwillingness or inability to meet a demand to move. I have also been thinking of HAC’s attorneys and advocates, who must now spend precious time that could have been spent on benefits cases that might result in stable housing instead tracking down clients who are forcibly removed in sweeps or ensuring those clients’ appearances for citations or fending off criminal consequences for their clients.

I have been thinking of HAC’s clients, entering a new and even more precarious era … and HAC’s attorneys who must now spend precious time that could have been spent on benefits cases instead tracking down clients who are forcibly removed in sweeps.

I have also been thinking about that morning in early January. What I knew intellectually, but not viscerally, until I walked my own neighborhood looking for my unhoused neighbors, was how much effort homeless people take on to maintain their own invisibility. That effort is an immense burden on folks already desperately overburdened by the difficulties of finding bathrooms, water, showers, while unhoused. I know so much of the experience of homelessness is hiding, evading police and complaints from businesses.

But the folks I spoke to were not hiding – they came out, in the darkness to talk to a stranger, a stranger affiliated with the government, even. Once I was tasked with looking, really looking for the unhoused people in my neighborhood, what I saw were neighbors, relating to our shared parks and streets as just that – shared. Despite their abandonment by so many systems and people, the folks I saw and spoke to were, like anyone else, claiming a small space in our public square as their own, and doing their best to respect the communal nature of that space. They were still trying to uphold a social contract that the rest of us had broken in leaving them with nowhere else to go.

I am not naive; I know that when Newsom orders the forcible removal of people from public space he is not talking about the single tent tucked into the corner of my local park. I have visited the larger encampments in Berkeley and spoken to their residents, who are concerned about trash collection and disruptive neighbors, just like the local business development district. Sharing public space is not always easy. Housed folks do battle about it all the time: my neighborhood is also covered with competing signs about whether a few feet of street should be parking or bike lanes.

The logic of removal does not just enable abuses against homeless individuals … It makes community impossible.

But the logic of removal, which it now seems as if my elected officials – unleashed by a right-wing Supreme Court – have wholly embraced, does not just enable abuses against homeless individuals, authorize the theft of their property, and ultimately threaten them with or actually enact the violence of incarceration. It makes community impossible. It is an abandonment of what California and local officials claimed, while Martin v. Boise restrained them, they were committed to on behalf of homeless people.

The organization responsible for the Point-in-Time Count in Alameda County is called “EveryOne Home.” That name now feels cruelly ironic: California has adopted the dehumanizing logic of the Supreme Court and decided that the problem is not a lack of homes, but the people who lack them. That if you cannot see homeless people, well, the problem is solved.

It will be another 18 months before Alameda County counts its homeless population again. California’s cruelty has raised an awful specter over that count: If there are fewer people to be counted, does it mean they have found a home, or just that elected leaders are so intent on making their own policy failures invisible that they have disappeared our neighbors altogether?

How the HUD Bi-annual Point-in-Time Count Works

The Impact of the Grants Pass Decision

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