NYC Wants You To Help Count Homeless People

NEW YORK, NY — It's that time of year again in NYC: time to bundle up for one long, cold night of roving city streets to count the homeless people who, despite harsh winter weather, would sooner see their fingers and toes turn purple than agree to sleep in one of the city's notoriously decrepit, unsafe or otherwise "deplorable" homeless shelters.

City officials issued a call Thursday for at least 3,000 volunteers to join their annual, crowdsourced homeless count — officially called the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) — on the night of Monday, Jan. 23, 2017.

The sweep will run from 10 p.m. that night to 4 a.m. the next morning. Register to volunteer here.

"The vital information volunteers collect," the NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS) said Thursday, "will mean that city outreach teams are able to help even more individuals move from the streets to a more stable, safe environment."

In 2016, volunteer counters — a whopping 3,800 of them — found around 2,800 homeless people on city streets, according to the DHS. (A 12 percent decline from the 2015 count.)

By the city's own count, another 60,000 homeless people are currently living in the NYC shelter system — which has become more of a hotel system over the past year, to astronomically expensive effect, as previously reported by Patch.

Under the mayor's HOME-STAT program, launched last spring, city workers also conduct their own homeless counts every three months. But the big, comprehensive volunteer count each winter — a tradition for more than a decade now — is considered the most reliable method of counting, and hopefully one day finding a home for, the city's street people.

Lead photo by Derek Mindler/Flickr