The steep drops in Sacramento’s homeless population seem way too good to be true | Opinion
Sacramento has had a 29% drop in its homeless population since 2022. Does that sound right to you?
Because it doesn’t sound right to me, it doesn’t sound right to homeless advocates at Loaves & Fishes, and it doesn’t sound right to an academic who has analyzed homeless data in Sacramento before.
Experts and advocates are questioning the methodology and the newly-released data from the 2024 “Point in Time Count.” The 2024 PIT count showed there was not only a 29% drop overall in homelessness in the county, but a 41% drop in unsheltered homeless — one of the largest decreases in the state.
Frankly, those numbers seem too good to be true.
Such precipitous decreases were the most surprising finding of the count announced earlier this week. Meanwhile, the non-profit organization in charge of the count, Sacramento Steps Forward, says it’s important to remember that the PIT count is just that — a point in time — and the number of homeless people living in our area can fluctuate daily.
This year’s Point in Time count, conducted by volunteers with SSF on Jan. 24 and 25, found 3,944 people living unsheltered, down from 6,664 people identified in the 2022 count, while the total number of unhoused people counted in Sacramento County, including those in shelter and temporary housing, dropped by 29 percent from 9,278 to 6,615.
Angela Hassell, Executive Director of Sacramento’s Loaves & Fishes, said that drop “isn’t a realistic portrait” of what she sees going on in Sacramento.
“These numbers are incredibly difficult to believe and further highlight the trust issues with local government that our guests have consistently expressed over our many years of service,” wrote Hassell along with Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, director of Maryhouse, a shelter for women and children.
“At Loaves & Fishes, we publish an annual report using a consistent methodology, and our numbers show a 6.4% overall increase in guests served, with a 20.5% increase in meals served…. All campus programs have reported serving more guests daily than last year,” Hassell and Dominguez-Stevens wrote in a press release.
Some believe sweeps, weather led to decrease
There is concern among homeless advocates that the PIT count numbers may have been deflated by several factors, including sweeps conducted in early January before the count.
The 2024 PIT count notes that 74% of people they surveyed reported that they’d had to move and find a new sleeping location within the last two months — a seriously high level of disruption that can be attributed, at least in part, to the city and county’s sweeps of encampments.
(Sweeps kill, by the way: Displacing the homeless creates a deadly cycle where people are repeatedly forced to move, many never getting access to the programs and services they desperately need to rise out of homelessness and has been shown to directly lead to increased mortality rates.)
Also, volunteers who participated in the January count emailed The Bee and said they found far fewer people than they knew were living on the streets, which she believed was due to the inclement weather and rain over the two nights the count was conducted.
The problem with such drastically lower numbers is that city and county services rely on the PIT count as a means of securing governmental funding for homelessness programs.
“(Funding) is going to be decreased all over the county and that means less services, less housing opportunities and less overall compassion and support for the folk who need it the most. That’s going to be really devastating and really heartbreaking,” Hassell said.
Data collection method changed
There was also a change to the way SSF collected and reported on this year’s data.
In previous years, SSF contracted with Sacramento State and Arturo Baiocchi, a tenured Social Work professor, to collect and extrapolate the data. This year, the job was done by SimTech Solutions, a software company based in Cambridge, Mass. The methodology of the survey was changed too, and that could also have affected the numbers.
This year’s PIT count was collected using census tracts as a means of organization, but those tracts can be miles-wide and take a single team many days to cover — and it has to be a single team to stop duplicative surveying. Previously, Sacramento’s surveys were done using smaller, more manageable “zones.”
Baiocchi said that when he was in charge of the PIT count, he did research into using census tracts, and officially warned SSF against the method.
Lisa Bates, CEO of SSF, said the numbers were surprising to them too, but the census-tract system is in use across the country. SSF also said more data on the homeless population would be released this summer.
Still, Baiocchi said, “I think the 41% is likely an artifact of canvassing too large of an area…. I also don’t see efforts (this year) to count hard-to-reach populations like families living in cars, transitional-aged youth or people living on the American River Parkway. These are all things we did in previous years.”
Drop is ‘unrealistic’ say advocates
The precipitous drop from 2022’s numbers is shocking for many. A slight decrease would have been believable, but 29% overall seems like there’s been an error in data collection, however unintentional.
“I would have recognized a 3%-5% increase or decrease,” Hassell said. “I would have accepted that as realistic. But the 29% and the 41% feels out of line with my experience as a homeless service provider.”
On the positive side, Baiocchi said, the surveys seem like they were done well, even if the count may not have been: “The same racial disparities, the same composition of data… those proportions seem right to me. But the numbers of unsheltered seem too low.”
And that’s “a shame,” he said, because Baiocchi believes the city and county have instituted programs in the last two years that would have helped decrease the homeless population in the capital region.
All anyone needs to do is look around the city and county to see that the drastic decreases being reported don’t accurately reflect the reality of Sacramento’s homeless population.
Sacramentans want nothing more than good news when it comes to the homelessness crisis, but we’re not fools.
This story was originally published June 7, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
