How big is California’s homelessness crisis? Inside the massive, statewide effort to find out

BY MARISA KENDALL | CALMatters (CALMATTERS) – Thousands of volunteers fanned out across California this week, peering down alleyways, into parked cars and along creek beds in a mass effort to count the state’s homeless population.  The federally mandated census, done every two years and dubbed the point-in-time count, serves as the main framework Californians use to understand their state’s homelessness crisis. The data it produces influence everything from allocations of state funding, to local policy decisions, to the way politicians talk about homelessness in campaign speeches.& The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which requires& the counts every other year,& compiles the data from across the country into an annual report& submitted to Congress. Last year, the department tallied 181,399 unhoused Californians — 28% of the nation’s total homeless population. That’s up nearly 40% from five years ago.& But the counts, despite being mandated by federal law and serving as the basis for any number of decisions on California housing and homelessness policy, rely on unpaid volunteers and are far from an exact science. Different counties in California tally their numbers differently. Some attempt to talk to each person they count, while others use algorithms to estimate how...