Last Wednesday night, I joined about 250 volunteers and observers who fanned out across San Francisco to count our city’s homeless population. This was important business: Imperfect as it may be, the every-other-year tally helps guide the city’s programs and policies, which are now bolstered by a billion-dollar budget.
With phone apps at the ready, the counters walked sidewalks and drove streets to tally people in tents, in makeshift shelters, or simply out in the cold. If they were lucky, the people we counted had jackets, blankets, and sleeping bags. Many did not.
I joined a group assigned to a big chunk of the city covering parts of South of Market and north of the Mission. We started at 8 pm and wrapped up by midnight as the temperature kept dropping. It hit a low of 38 degrees hours later.
Not a perfect science
The point-in-time count, as it’s known, is mandatory for counties to receive federal funds for housing and services. It’s supposed to happen every two years, but COVID canceled the 2021 count. SF’s last tally was 2019, and even with more than 600 volunteers on the job, the 8,035 total was widely considered an undercount.
Folks who work with the homeless expect this year’s count to be much higher, but we won’t know the results for months. A team at the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), with help from an outside consultant, will collect the street data, add it to counts from overnight shelters, jails, and emergency hotels still in use, then fold in information from hundreds of detailed surveys. A more comprehensive picture that includes race, ethnicity, gender identity, and housing history should emerge this summer.
“It’s not a perfect science,” acknowledged HSH deputy director of planning and strategy Cynthia Nagendra, who oversees the data team. But the “snapshot” count helps HSH calibrate the growing body of information the department collects on a rolling basis. “It is a continuing work in progress to get better data,” she said.
Handing out socks
The difficulty of getting precise numbers was clear Wednesday night. Our group, which started as five and soon dwindled to three, was as meticulous as possible. Our group leader was Elgin Rose, director of outreach for Code Tenderloin, a nonprofit that provides job training and other services. The group also included HSH’s Nagendra and an elderly couple whom I’ll call G and M, as they didn’t consent to being part of a story.
Guidelines called for not engaging with or approaching anyone; our group brushed that aside. Formerly homeless himself, Rose stopped often to chat, and once or twice folks greeted him with a shout of “Elgin!” He handed out his number and encouraged people to come get help. We asked if people knew about the Tenderloin linkage center, which opened a month ago to connect people to housing, drug treatment, and other services. Some did, some didn’t.
Rose had a pickup truck big enough to seat all of us in the cab, and to stock a few sleeping bags in the back. We handed out blankets, scarves, socks (very popular), water bottles, and more.
We started the night on Mission Street. Rose parked in front of a group hanging out in front of the Potter Hotel, an SRO, and we set out on foot. We counted more than a dozen people in the first 30 minutes, mostly on Mission, and we stopped to talk or hand out supplies to all of them. This wasn’t just counting, this was connecting. We were doing the job that the city’s homeless outreach team does every day.
But we couldn’t keep up that pace. We had barely covered half of our first section on foot in 90 minutes, and the second would be even larger. (The two combined were more than a third of a square mile.)
So we piled back into Rose’s pickup and continued on four wheels. Once back in the truck, M started coughing and wheezing. She had pulmonary disease, and G was worried. He couldn’t hide the concern in his voice as she slumped against the window of the cab. They got out on 8th Street, and we waited for another Code Tenderloin organizer to come pick them up and take them home.
‘I’m gonna keep working him’
Our second section kept us busy. It was bounded by 16th Street to the south, Potrero to the east, and stretched north to take up a slice of SoMA — including the SF Eagle bar and the nightlife strip on 11th Street. We had plenty of encampments to count under the freeway along Division and in the streets and alleys alongside warehouses. RVs and vans clustered along several blocks south of the Best Buy and Rainbow Grocery.
No doubt we didn’t catch all the parked vehicles doubling as shelter, and we often could only estimate how many people were camping under a makeshift assembly of tarps, tents, and jerry-rigged supports.
We couldn’t stop much, but Rose sensed an opportunity on a desolate street surrounded by warehouses, where one encampment — a low sprawling tarp — seemed more organized than some of the sites we rolled up on that night. Rose called out; a wary Black man emerged, perhaps assuaged that Rose, also Black, immediately made clear this was about help, not enforcement. He said he wanted housing, took Rose’s card, and told us his name. (For privacy, I’ll call him L.)
One heartbreaking moment was in an alley near the gleaming new SPCA headquarters. Three cardboard scraps were roughly assembled into a tiny crawl-in shelter, as if the occupant were bivouacking on a mountain ledge. The occupant was 20 feet ahead, standing in a pile of food and other scraps, pushing them back and forth with a stick. It wasn’t the only time that night that Rose and Nagendra, who see such scenes regularly, couldn’t help but murmur and sigh.
There was at least one glimmer of momentum. Rose texted me a few days later that L had gotten in touch. He wasn’t going to jump right into services, or even housing, but “I’m gonna keep working him until he gets relief,” Rose added.
Nagendra ended up counting 127 people on her app. Rose was also counting, but he groaned in alarm as we wrapped up. His app only showed 5 people. He had definitely counted more. Nagendra later told me she was keeping track to avoid duplication and added 16 more to her count, to bring our group’s total to 143.
Frost outside
I woke up the next morning to see frost covering our neighbors’ roofs. It made me think of one person my group counted on Juniper Street, a South of Market dead-end alley a few steps from the Costco.
We were driving down Folsom Street, nearly done with our route, and slowed to peer down the alley. I thought I saw a shape next to one of several large planters that lined the sidewalk. Rose backed up his truck until we reached the person, completely covered by a blanket, an open paperback face down on the pavement. No tent, no sleeping bag.
Rose got out and gingerly approached. Hello, he called, do you need anything? They peeked out and said something. I couldn’t hear, but Elgin seemed frustrated, his body language delicate. The person didn’t want help. He came back to the truck but paused, and Nagendra sensed his hesitation. “If we could find a place tonight,” she asked, “could we bring them in?”
Rose went back to try again. No luck. If there wasn’t real housing available, they weren’t interested. And with that, we had to leave. It was midnight. We were the last group out on the streets, and we couldn’t stop yawning. We all had homes and beds waiting for us.
Alex Lash is the editor in chief of The Frisc.