By Blake Nelson | [email protected] | The San Diego Union-Tribune
Encampments, not people, are being tallied over here. Kids, sans parents, are counted over there.
There are several methods for quantifying homelessness in San Diego County, encompassing a grab bag of methodologies that can be confusing for anyone not immersed in the crisis.
Yet the numbers carry real weight. Grants and other financial aid may be tied to certain totals. Cities often rely on outside organizations to oversee the tallies, setting the stage for controversy whenever local leaders disagree with the results. Varying approaches also allow elected officials to pick and choose which statistics they find most favorable.
Here's how five of the most commonly cited counts work.
This is the big one.
One day a year, more than 1,000 volunteers walk all over San Diego County looking for homeless people. Teams hike across waterways, tramp under overpasses and scour parks for signs of tents. Anyone found is asked a series of questions about a range of topics, including whether they struggle with mental health or drug addiction.
Volunteers also reach out to every local shelter to ask: How many people are staying there right now?
This most recently happened in January. The Regional Task Force on Homelessness then spent months organizing the data and released the newest numbers in May, which showed that homelessness countywide had dropped for the first time in years.
There are benefits to this approach. The count includes domestic violence shelters, which -- because of understandably higher privacy standards -- aren't always included in other tallies. More volunteers are likely on the street during the morning of the census than the number of full-time outreach workers who are able to drive around the county on other days.
Plus, the federal government says counties have to do this. Otherwise, they're not eligible for federal funding.
But the drawbacks are obvious. It lasts one day. If it rained the night before, people on the street might get a hotel. Sudden flooding could clear out a riverbed encampment. Anyone crashing on a friend's couch, or who found a particularly isolated place outside, may be missed. One formerly homeless woman said in an interview earlier this year that she always hid from the count's volunteers.
El Cajon leaders have disputed their most recent numbers that showed an increase in unsheltered homelessness and proposed creating their own count. (Chula Vista is already doing this, although its internal statistics have not been significantly different from the task force's.)
At best, officials say this tally should be taken as the minimum number of homeless people in San Diego County.
The task force also releases monthly reports that show the crisis from a different angle.
If you lose a place to stay and approach a service organization for help, your name and information will probably be entered into a database called the Homeless Management Information System. More than 140 agencies participate, and that data can easily track when people first enter homelessness, as well as when (or if) they're later connected to housing.
Leaders obviously want the number of homeless people getting under a steady roof to regularly exceed how many individuals end up on the street. Yet for most months since late 2021, when the task force began publishing this data, the reverse happened.
In April, for example, more than 1,080 people countywide reported becoming homeless for the first time. (And that's truly a first-time number: Someone who, say, became homeless in February, re-found housing in March and then got evicted again in April would not be included in last month's total.) During the same period, however, 966 homeless people were housed.
By that measure, homelessness grew by at least a few individuals during each month of this year.
But task force officials don't like using the data to add up the county's total homeless population. For one, anybody refusing offers for help wouldn't be in the records (although those same people might participate in the point-in-time survey) and domestic violence shelters aren't included (ditto).
Then there are the schools. Let's start with San Diego Unified.
At the beginning of each year, students throughout the district fill out a housing questionnaire. Kids living in "cars, parks" and "abandoned buildings" are certainly considered homeless, according to district policy. Yet so are those "sharing the housing of other persons" as well as children "living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations."
This means that a massive subset of the homeless population -- one easily missed by point-in-time counts or monthly data reports -- is being captured in the classroom.
San Diego Unified enters the questionnaires into a database called PowerSchool, and those records are then passed along to the California Department of Education. The state agency collects similar data from every district in the county, and the results are sobering.
For the 2024-25 school year, San Diego County had 19,841 homeless students. That's just kids. Parents aren't included.
That total is a significant increase from the prior academic year, when there were fewer than 17,900, and more than double the number of men, women and children found during the point-in-time count.
Additionally, some private organizations conduct regular tallies of very specific areas.
The Downtown San Diego Partnership, an economic-development nonprofit, has in recent years offered more homelessness-related services. That's included monthly counts of the number of people sleeping outside in downtown San Diego.
Teams survey a stretch of land that begins near the water and extends to Interstate 5, which wraps around much of the urban core, according to the nonprofit's map. (Some blocks north of West Ash Street that encompass Little Italy are excluded.)
In April, the Downtown Partnership counted 902 unsheltered people in the area. That was an increase of several dozen individuals from the previous month, although tallies have recently been far lower than what was seen before the City Council passed a camping ban in 2023. At one point that year, there were 2,104 residents on local sidewalks.
When San Diego leaders say that homelessness has decreased since the passage of the Unsafe Camping Ordinance, they may be referring to just the partnership's count.
The picture is similarly looking better in more remote areas.
The San Diego River Park Foundation checks multiple times a week to see how many active encampments are near the region's waterways. The risks of homelessness might be highest in the riverbed, as flooding can kill, fires easily spread, pollution threatens the water and overdoses may go undetected.
The foundation's tallies, which include the city of San Diego and Santee, focus on the camp sites themselves, not people. An encampment can include multiple hand-built structures spread across a 25-meter area, meaning several individuals could live at a single location.
The number of active sites grew repeatedly during the pandemic, and at one point in late 2022 the riverbed had 130 encampments, the highest total on record.
Numbers then fell unevenly before rising again in the wake of San Diego's camping ban. A foundation official previously said that some individuals in the riverbed were trying to avoid tickets from police.
But newer tallies are encouraging. Teams last month counted 63 active encampments between the two cities, the lowest total in years. Officials have credited state grants that cover cleanup costs and connect homeless residents to a range of services, including one that helps pay rent.