A bogus homeless count let leaders brag — and robbed Sacramento of millions | Opinion
Some of us didn’t believe it when the numbers dropped for the federally-mandated count of homeless people living in Sacramento County in 2024, which showed a staggering 41% decrease in the county’s homeless population over the previous two years.
The Point in Time count, in which hundreds of volunteers fanned out across the county over two nights to count homeless people, supposedly found 3,944 “unsheltered” homeless people living on the streets and another 2,671 living in various shelters.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development commissions the count every two years; locally, it’s carried out by Sacramento Steps Forward, the nonprofit that also coordinates the county’s homeless resources.
Amazingly, Sacramento County reported the largest drop in homelessness of any county in the state in 2024.
Which seemed… wrong. Those numbers clashed with what Sacramentans were seeing with our own eyes on the streets every day; a homeless population that was seemingly worse off than before.
So how could Sacramento’s homeless population have shrunk by nearly half? But it was difficult to argue with data.
Moreover, it was difficult to argue with jubilant city and county officials who rejoiced in the apparent validation of their homelessness policies, which were unpopular among both business owners and residents, frustrated by the presence of homeless camps in neighborhoods across the county, but especially within Sacramento’s city limits.
Beyond elected officials and government bureaucrats gloating and congratulating themselves, a federal count showing 6,600 homeless people ultimately resulted in a loss of at least $21 million in grant funding for homeless programs serving the county, according to a researcher at Sacramento State University.
Then we learned last week that a new count showed nearly 9,000 homeless in the county, less than two years after the shocking 2024 numbers. The new numbers seem far more accurate and is being reported by Sacramento Steps Forward’s internal Homeless Management Information System for September 2025. That system showed that nearly 9,000 people have engaged with a service provider in the last 90 days. That’s a nearly 50% increase.
The more recent number — far more in line with Sacramento’s 2022 Point in Time count than its 2024 count — is the impetus once again for community concerns about how accurate that 2024 number truly was.
A too-good-to-be-true count starts to unravel
So how did Sacramento get the state’s lowest Point in Time count in 2024?
Was it the extensive sweep of homeless camps that had occurred in the days and weeks before the count was conducted? Was it the new methodology the county had employed? Was it plain human error? Or had homelessness truly, drastically dropped by 41% in 2024 in Sacramento, only to rise by 35% again by the end of 2025?
“Camps haven’t just gotten smaller, they (were) scattered,” Niki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, said last year when interviewed by The Bee. Jones frequently visits the camps, and said she believed the 2024 Point in Time count volunteers were unable to get an accurate number because many of the area’s homeless people were hiding from law enforcement officers telling them to move.
“There’s no significant increase in the number of people sheltered, and there has only been limited growth in permanent or supportive housing. Which means people are going unseen and uncounted,” Jones said.
The city’s own data also showed that, during the week of Jan. 22, 2024 when the count was being conducted, the city towed 90 vehicles and notified another 257 with an order to move. In fact, the 2024 Point in Time count noted that a 74% of people reported being forced into find a new sleeping location within the previous two months.
A new methodology? Or just bad math?
Or perhaps it was the county’s new methodology for conducting the Point in Time count?
Arturo Baiocchi, an associate professor of social work at Sacramento State University, had previously led Sacramento’s Point in Time count for years until 2024, when Sacramento County and at least nine other California counties switched to using data collection and analysis by a Massachusetts-based company, SimTech Solutions.
“In theory, the Point in Time estimate should exceed the (Homeless Management Information System) active list because most unsheltered individuals in any jurisdiction are not currently connected to outreach or shelter,” Baiocchi said.
Historically, this has borne out in Sacramento, he said: “When we conducted the Point in Time in prior cycles, the vast majority of survey respondents reported they had not interacted with an outreach worker recently, and (Sacramento Steps Forward’s) attempt to match Point in Time survey respondents to (Homeless Management Information System, or HMIS) records produced only a small overlap. That’s consistent with research nationally.”
But Baiocchi added that, in practice, the HMIS counts can sometimes appear higher than Point in Time numbers for two reasons. First, the Point in Time count is typically a conservative number, especially of unsheltered individuals, and the information system count covers a broader time window, “capturing people who interacted with the system in recent months, even if they weren’t literally homeless on (the Point in Time count) night,” he said.
So, if Sacramento’s HMIS active list is rising while the Point in Time count showed a large drop, two explanations are plausible, Baiocchi reasoned. Either the management system coverage, which is used by many local homeless aid organizations, has improved and the Point in Time significantly was undercounted in 2024 — or homelessness is rising extremely quickly in Sacramento.
“My sense is that the first explanation is more likely,” Baiocchi said. “Sampling Point in Time counts by census tracts is difficult… (and) Sacramento’s 2024 unsheltered Point in Time numbers were also strikingly different from the rest of the state, where unsheltered homelessness stayed roughly flat while overall homelessness increased slightly.”
Baiocchi was invited by Sacramento Steps Forward to join the oversight committee that conducts the Point in Time count, but said he’s been unimpressed by the organization and expected to interact with the researchers at SimTech to learn more about how the company crunches the county’s Point in Time count data.
That hasn’t happened, he said, and committee meetings have been mainly about how many volunteers are signing up for the 2026 count.
SimTech Solutions did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Sacramento Steps Forward.
When bad numbers cost real money — and real lives
So what does it really matter if there are 9,000 homeless people in Sacramento, or 6,000? Either number feels impossibly large, with no solutions in sight, and there doesn’t seem to be one way to get a fully accurate count of such a fluidly mobile community.
Ultimately, the number matters because it dictates how much money Sacramento County receives from state and federal funding programs.
Sacramento County lost out on more than $21 million in Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant funding between 2023 and 2024, from California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, thanks to the deflated numbers.
That’s money that could have gone toward housing thousands of Sacramentans who are currently homeless, with more falling into homelessness every day. Even though the state government is threatening to curtail how much money it’s giving municipalities, and the federal government under the current administration is openly hostile to many of Sacramento’s proposed programs, now is the time to fight back, not shrink away.
We can’t do that if we don’t present a clear picture of the problem, first and foremost.
At least in one way, the underreported 2024 count was an accurate reflection of Sacramento’s problem with homelessness: Not that it was a true count of the region’s unsheltered population, but rather as a reflection of Sacramento’s leadership and their constant need to place the appearance of success above the real needs of people living in homelessness.
This story was originally published December 4, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
