It’s 2026, and you can play “Doom II” on a small computer you keep in your pocket that’s far, far more powerful than the mainframes that directed Apollo 11 to the moon and back.
But in cities across the nation, do-gooders and professionals are preparing for that ritual known as the homeless point-in-time count, where they will venture out to tally homeless people by wandering around city streets with clipboards, manually counting anyone who, say, looks like Jack Dorsey.
San Francisco’s next count is coming on Jan. 29. It is a ritual with some purpose, in that it is necessary to do this to receive federal funds.
But the tally is done using methods that would’ve been standard operating procedure during the crafting of “The Domesday Book.” Adding to the anachronistic nature of it all, this is done every other year.
That’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. But worry not: The city has announced that, this year, it will refine the methodology behind the homeless point-in-time count. Instead of holding the count between 8 p.m. and midnight, the small army of clipboard-toting counters will now head out between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m.
This will clear up a lot of the ambiguity about who’s homeless and who’s just out and about. Another new policy is that, this year, counters will talk to the people they’re tallying. That’s a big deal: Without a conversation, you might indeed count Jack Dorsey (net worth: $3.9 billion) as homeless.
With the benefit of conversation, counters should also do better at discerning between a homeless person in the Tenderloin and a formerly homeless person in the Tenderloin who lives in an SRO and likes to go outside for a walk sometimes.
But, truth be told, these shifts in the city’s point-in-time count methodology are a bit like the Ford Motor Company rolling out a better horse and buggy at the 2026 Detroit Auto Show.
The city’s count protocol displays both a deeply antiquated way of thinking about who is homeless, and an even more deeply antiquated way of tabulating that number.
Other cities held their counts at more suitable hours years ago. San Francisco, however, took its time doing the same because it was thought to be methodologically desirable to keep making the same mistakes for consistency’s sake.
It’s perverse, but when you get better at counting, you can no longer confidently compare your numbers from this year to the ones two years ago and the ones two years before that.
Here’s some halfway decent news: This isn’t the only means of tracking homelessness. City government is already measuring that in more sophisticated ways.
San Francisco, like every city, compiles scads of data and sends it to the feds. We know how many people are accessing shelter and services. Unless they’re ninjas who make it very hard to be seen, we know who they are.
That is partly why nobody in homeless services in San Francisco takes the point-in-time count all that seriously as a management tool. Truth be told, the real number of people who were homeless in San Francisco is far, far higher than the 8,323 people counted during the point-in-time count on the single night of Jan. 30, 2024.
The number of people who experience homelessness at some point during the year and seek shelter or services is consistently about three times whatever the point-in-time tally is. That’s the real number.
But many officials in San Francisco — and quite a few media outlets — remain hung up on the count. Homelessness is a messy and complicated issue, but a single, overarching number is not complicated.
For a government official, if number goes up, you’ve failed. If number goes down, you’ve succeeded. If number goes up by less than counts in other major cities, you’ve kinda-sorta succeeded; losing by less is the new winning.
For the media, number go up or number go down is an easy story and an easy headline. Ignoring distinctions between people on the street or in shelter, people in vehicles, individuals and families and children and simply coming up with an ur-homeless number, in the end, is leaving readers less informed, not more.
In 2019, your humble narrator wrote a column about the homeless point-in-time count titled “In San Francisco, we obsess over contrived homeless stats — and neglect the ones we really ought to know.”
A lot has changed since then, but the central conceit of that column remains. There are, believe it or not, beneficial uses for the biennial homeless point-in-time count, in addition to being a requirement to receive federal funding, which it is.
The point-in-time count isn’t useful for determining overarching homeless numbers. But it is useful for ferreting out patterns in distinct communities.
You can spot cars and RVs and tents a lot easier than someone (a ninja?) hiding in the dark. You can discern and begin to quantify trends, like the explosion in RVs and people living in vehicles. You can track increases or decreases in shelters. This year, the point-in-time count will all but certainly record a sharp reduction in tents.
Are there more homeless people in recent years, or is San Francisco just getting better at counting? The answer is probably “yes.”
While the city resisted intuitive changes in counting methodology, like operating at more sensible hours and actually talking to people, in recent years the city did become much more thorough in tallying people in jails, shelters and even hard-to-reach places like the federal Golden Gate National Recreation Area or land owned by Caltrans.
It is unambiguously good to have accurate tallies of homeless people in places like shelters and jails, especially if you can then begin connecting inmates to services before release instead of just expelling them into street homelessness.
San Francisco, in recent years, even tallied homeless people who, by federal definition, would not be homeless: That’s incarcerated people, but also people in treatment facilities or hospitals.
This, again, is a good thing to do if you’re actually interested in identifying and helping vulnerable people.
But, predictably, this resulted in larger tallies of homeless people, which were compared, apples-to-oranges, to earlier homeless counts that did not include these people, and loud headlines about spiking homelessness: Number go up.
Alas. No good deed goes unpunished. Count on it.
In 2000, I worked for the US Census which organized the first systematic homeless count in San Francisco. (TJ Johnston, a fine person and the editor of the Street Sheet also worked for the Census that year).
Because I was homeless, I was included at several high-level liaison meetings between the Census and city officials (Willie Brown was mayor then).
I believe that marked the beginning of my political education and radicalization.
At every step of the planning process I was most struck by how leading city stakeholders viewed the count: not as a tool to address and alleviate homeless, but as a way to tap lucrative federal funding.
Much has happened since 2000 when our federal election was brazenly “stolen” with the predictable acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Inequality in our city, state, nation, and world has grown to a degree almost impossible to grasp.
W. Edwards Deming once said that a thermometer can’t tell us if we feel hot or cold. Likewise, improving homeless counts and data gathering can’t address a system that has reliably produced more homeless over the past 25+ years. (And billionaires too.)
With counting the homeless it’s like playing whack a mole.
I have been preaching this Sermon for 12 years at the LHCB .We cannot use the 2026 as a comparison since we have changed the methodology. I support the new hours and the supplemental surveys.But we GOT to count visitors in the SROs.Very easy to do.All SROs keep visitor logs.
I participated in several Point-in-Time Counts. We use to do them in warm weather September/October. When we switched to cold weather Jan/Feb, folks were buried deeper at night and it was harder to find them. The count went down.
Hopefully the count everywhere versus just downtown since the numbers in Excelsior have risen 10-fold plus over past few months – feels like the city is just moving them from the civic center out to the outer areas.
Like the saying goes, most people use statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.
Isnt camping on public property illegal yet ?
Why were not the “ homeless” rounded up and removed at the same time ?
Public property is for all to use and have access .
Any obstruction partial or complete on a sideway is an ADA violation.
Public passageways must be clear of obstruction 24/7.
If someone cannot take care of themselves and is on the street , they are impaired . Laws allow them to be removed .
They should be .
Letting persons rot on the sidewalks is not normal
Time for a refugee like camp in golden gate park or other location
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
Any other major US city would have moved or told the homeless to go to less expensive areas a long time ago. SF is great in many ways, but the way it refuses to solve homelessness is absurd.
Joe O’Donoghue,
used to say …
“Figgers don’t lie but liars can figger.”
My view of the bottom line here and, living mostly on the bottom it’s my usual view …
We’ve always needed some kind of basic sustenance guarantee as a Human ideal and I do believe these kids down on Howard Street are going to produce it as a byproduct of their greed.
Which will drive them to create the strongest AI as fast as possible and it will quickly take charge and take care of every single Human.
One way or another.
lol
You used to be considered homeless if you lived in an SRO because it was viewed to be ‘transitional housing’ cause there were plenty of units for everyone in the pipeline.
It’s how I lived on McAllister yet legally ran against Gavin Newsome in D-2 in 2002.
Changed the law for me they did.
That bright light you see appearing in the distance is end to these petty problems for good.
Cause It’s either the eternal horn of plenty.
Or, the first nuclear explosion.
go Niners anyway !!
(thanks for wonderfully entertaining season beyond expectations)
h.
Since, the homeless are transitory, it’s almost impossible to court them,some go to places where they can get the best services, like the East Bay and return here, and then there are the ones, that arrive daily from out of state.
California should have sued other states for bussing their homeless people to our state years ago. It is especially ridiculous when states with policymakers that hate on California often, like Texas and Idaho, bus their homeless here instead of providing for them themselves . California, take a case to the Supreme Court! The issue is federal due to the crossing of state lines. Other states keep taking advantage of our goodwill, and it should have been stopped at least a decade ago.