The three-night Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count moves to the San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles Wednesday evening after beginning in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys and metro Los Angeles area Tuesday.
Volunteers in the San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles will count on Wednesday. The count will wrap up Thursday in the Antelope Valley, West and South Los Angeles, and the South Bay/Harbor region.
Ahead of the count, The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority officials said they enacted several improvements for the operation.
The count is the largest unsheltered point-in-time count in the nation and is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for continuums of care across the nation. The count provides essential data that determines how federal, state, and local funding are distributed for housing, shelter, outreach, and supportive services.
Hundreds of volunteers fanned out across the San Fernando Valley and metro Los Angeles area Tuesday night to begin the annual three-night Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count.
The tally provides a point-in-time snapshot of homelessness throughout the L.A. Continuum of Care — which covers most of the region except the cities of Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale, which will conduct their respective counts.
The LASHA is expected to release the results in late spring or early summer.
Gita O’Neill, LAHSA interim CEO, provided remarks at a 7 p.m. briefing Tuesday at Inner City Law Center, 1309 E. Seventh St., to mark the first night of the operation.
The homelessness agency will be using an app-based data collection process for the fourth year in a row and improved maps, assigning more staff to provide technical support and help with supply distribution at deployment sites, and to ensure volunteers collect their materials to get the count done quickly and efficiently.
LAHSA also simplified training materials to improve the volunteer experience and ensure consistency across LA county.
The agency is coordinating with the county’s Department of Health Services and Emergency Centralized Response Center for additional staff support. This improvement is expected to aid in “special consideration” census tracts and areas, and more rugged locations such as basins, creeks and deserts that are too dangerous, hard-to-reach or inaccessible for community volunteers.
Lastly, the processes for the Housing Inventory (sheltered) and Youth counts have been overhauled to improve response rates and generate bigger samples.
The Youth Count will be conducted over nine additional days for those aged 10 to 19. In a similar fashion, the Housing Inventory Count will begin earlier to optimize data review and make it easier to validate responses.