Point In Time Count

Last week, we did a community point-in-time count of homeless people here in Orange County. The goal is to count everyone in the county who classifies as homeless by HUD standards. By far the largest portion of our homeless population is covered by the service agencies, but we also had to count those individuals who live on the street and don't use the services. In the past, the street count portion has been handled by the police exclusively. As part of our effort to increase the accuracy of our reporting, we decided to try using volunteers rather than the police this year. Since it was our first time to use volunteers, we decided to start slow and partner volunteers with police officers and then use those volunteers to develop a training program for a summer count. Our goal is to make this an entirely volunteer activity; it's going to take much more training and preparation than I anticipated.

I went out with the Carrboro officer from 9:00 pm - 11:30 pm. It was a very cold and windy night so fortunately we only found two guys, both of whom were willing to talk with us. We began by driving around looking for anyone walking. Next we began checking out a list of places that had been compiled by the other officers on the force (underpasses, abandoned houses, etc.). Fortunately, we only found two guys out that night. They were just walking around trying to keep warm. When we pulled up in the car, they were very hesitant to talk with us at first (no surprise there!), but the the police officer really knew how to talk to them and help them relax their guard. They told us that homelessness, substance abuse, and unemployment are a vicious cycle. If you drink, you can't hold a job; if you can't hold a job, you lose your housing; if you lose your housing, you can't get a new job; if you can't get a new job, you keep on drinking.

It's interesting to see the town late at night from the eyes of a cop. I had no idea that people hangout in the rafters of road overpasses, or that there are small communities of individuals living in tent cities within the urban area. All we saw was the sites that night, but one place we went really scared me. Besides being outside with only industrial plastic covering beds that had been pulled out of dumpsters, the amount of trash spread around the site was just unbelievable. I've lived in cities so I've seen desperate poverty, but this was different. I can't imagine living like that or how it must feel to be so totally cut off from the wealth and prosperity that is this community. It was a very humbling experience.

...homelessness deprives people of far more than shelter. They have no place from which to be productive and giving, to be restored, to be welcomed, to be themselves, to give physical expression to their personalities. The homeless are, quite simply, deprived of their humanity. Restoring that to them requires more than grudging public expenditure and warehouses where they can sleep at night....I don't know the solution for homelessness. What I do know is that it requires more than an impersonal institution that removes the homeless from our sight and our minds. It requires some attention, some engagement from all of us, some willingness to focus on homeless people not as statistics but as individuals, needing care, needing to be welcomed back as full members of the human race.

--Donella Meadows, Being Homeless is More Than Being Without Shelter