2020 Homeless Count Underway In Maricopa County

PHOENIX, AZ — It was still dark when a group of three volunteers came across a dirt lot in west Phoenix on Tuesday.

To the cars speeding down McDowell Road in the early morning hours of Jan. 28, the clandestine shelter probably looked like trash, if it was noticed at all. But for the volunteers, trained to spot homeless encampments, it was what they had been searching for.

The volunteers approached the cardboard shelter slowly and cautiously. “Is that a guy?” one whispered.

A man had stood up, poking his head out from behind the cardboard wall. After exchanging a few words, the man who identified himself as Adrian invited them to approach, introducing his girlfriend Pam.

One volunteer began asking Adrian a series of survey questions. “How old are you?”, “Where did you sleep last night?”, “How long have you been experiencing homelessness?”, “Do you have any medical conditions?”

“Every one of them,” Adrian said to the last question. The 60-year-old had been dealing with heart problems and a knee injury that doctors had been unable to diagnose. Trips to specialists swallowed his money, and he and Pam wound up on the street 17 months ago.

The volunteer asked Adrian why they hadn’t tried to secure a spot in a homeless shelter.

“Every time we call, they say they’re full,” he said. “We just got tired of asking.”

The team of volunteers gave the couple their well-wishes, and left them with a list of resources that might be able to provide help.

Throughout the morning, the team scoured industrial complexes, abandoned fields, parking lots and residential neighborhoods to count as many people as they could find who spent the previous night unsheltered.

Every year, counties across the U.S. participate in the Point-In-Time Homeless Count, a sort of census for those living on the streets or in shelters on one night out of the year.

The count is organized by the Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG). Hundreds of volunteers are split up into groups and assigned their own “grid.” The data that volunteers collect across the 9,000 square miles of Maricopa County is tabulated by MAG before it’s passed along to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sometime in May, which is when the data will become available to the public.

A 'Snapshot,' Not An Exact Science

Anyone familiar with the count will tell you that it’s not a perfect science. The data collected every January is meant to serve as a “snapshot” of homelessness, said Amy Schwabenlender, executive director of the Human Services Campus, located in downtown Phoenix. The campus connects people experiencing homelessness to a variety of resources including housing, legal services and employment help.

“(The Point-In-Time Homeless Count) allows the community to see if there are major trends year over year,” Schwabenlender said.

Last year, 6,614 people were counted, a number that has slowly increased since 2017.

Schwabenlender, however, is hopeful that the upward trend won’t continue this year. The coalition of agencies she oversees haven’t seen an increased need over the past year. “I’m optimistic that the total will be about flat,” she said.

However, she’s less sure about the proportion of unsheltered individuals, who can be more difficult to track.

“It’s hard for me to judge what I see from my window,” she said.

The proportion of unsheltered homeless people has been increasing since 2014, ballooning to nearly half of all individuals counted in 2019. Those considered “unsheltered” are people who have spent the previous night in a place unfit for human habitation, like on a park bench or in a vehicle.

Besides being a requirement for the Human Services Campus to receive federal funding, the count also provides communities with information on homlessness in their area. “I think some folks don’t want to believe they have homeless in their community,” Schwabenlender said.

“It’s helpful … to demonstrate to all those cities and towns in Maricopa County that people are experiencing homelessness everywhere,” she said. “It’s not just a Phoenix problem.”

New Developments

In previous years, the Maricopa Association of Governments piloted a survey app to replace the traditional clipboards and pencils. This year’s count was the first time the app version was rolled out across the county, said Shantae Smith, a human services planner with MAG.

“This app can help us provide real-time data” on the location of unsheltered homeless individuals, Smith said.

Housing and Urban Development provides a list of questions, but counties are allowed to add their own, as well. For the first time, volunteers asked individuals over the age of 18 if they had ever been in foster care.

“Anecdotally, quite a few have had foster care involvements,” Smith said.

The survey was updated in 2019 to include pets in the count of unsheltered individuals, a question that remained on this year’s survey. Last year, 182 pets were found on the streets accompanying their owners, including 10 service animals.

For some, pets can be an obstacle in finding temporary or permanent housing, Smith said.

It’s the reason Shauna and her husband, Avi, both 33, are sleeping on the street rather than staying in a shelter. It’s because of “that beautiful girl right there,” said Shauna, pointing to their 9-month-old brown and white pitbull named Callie Bear – “like a California Brown Bear,” Shauna said.

Most homeless shelters do not accept animals, and even permanent housing options are often pet-restrictive.

People experiencing homelessness typically don’t have the resources to pay costly pet deposits or fully vaccinate their animals, Smith said, and many are unwilling to part with their animal companions in order to secure housing.

Disconnected Funding Systems

The number of homeless individuals identified in the Point-In-Time count does not translate into proportionate federal funding dollars – that’s not how it works, Schwabenlender said.

Counties across the U.S. are in competition for funding from Housing and Urban Development, and there’s only so much money to go around.

When homeless numbers go up, that can cause applications to HUD to lose points, which means the organization could receive less funding, or have more difficulty in funding new projects, said Schwabenlender.

HUD is not the Human Services Campus’s sole funding stream – it relies on a patchwork of systems to fund projects – but these systems aren’t necessarily coordinating, Schwabenlender said.

“The funding streams are all separate … overall, these big systems aren’t really linked in my opinion,” she said.

“I don’t know that anyone is actually looking at the whole picture at one time.”

By Madeline Ackley of the Arizona Mirror

This story was originally published by the Arizona Mirror. For more stories from the Arizona Mirror, visit AZMirror.com.