County testing new 'Point in Time' strategy to better understand homeless population

A short flight of rain-spattered stairs separated a homeless woman and Jarrod Moran, Kitsap County’s HEART team coordinator, as he approached her Friday.

The woman sat at the foot of the steps at a Bremerton city park alongside her partner and yipping puppy, with her back turned towards Moran, her face obscured by a thick shawl. She was initially hesitant to speak with Moran, who stood at the top with a clipboard listing several questions: name, age, gender and where she would be staying for the night.

But as Moran slowly broke the ice, conversing with her partner about available services, their life together and casual references back to the inquiries, the gap between them slowing closed. By the time Moran and his HEART team partner had inched their way down to the sandy ground beneath the woman, she was ready to speak with them and add to the information Moran was collecting as part of the 2024 Kitsap County "Point in Time" count.

For the last week, Moran and homelessness and housing service providers have been busy contacting unhoused people across the County to document the population’s size and demographics. The Point in Time count is conducted nationwide annually in the last week of January, mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to track homeless trends.

Last year’s count revealed that there were 245 homeless people across the county, a 34% increase from 2022, though service providers have considered this to be an underestimate. This year, the Point in Time survey is pursuing a different strategy. With an inaugural count at the Salvation Army during Project Connect on January 23, a team of service providers are searching the county’s streets and shadows to get a more accurate number this year.

Subbing in the service providers

The Point in Time count is meant to be a snapshot of homelessness across the United States on a winter night when resources are likely maximized, setting up a vivid picture of those who can’t access emergency shelter or crisis response assistance. The count is positioned at the end of the month to ensure that people who can only pay for temporary housing for part of the month are also included in the count. But, a snapshot is just a snapshot.

Community volunteers used to fan out in the early morning on the last Thursday of January to conduct the 2023 survey over the course of one day, targeting areas scouted out by service providers in the week beforehand, said Kitsap County Housing and Homelessness program manager Carl Borg.

After last year’s count, Moran and the county’s Housing and Homelessness Coalition, the project’s lead agency, took a moment to reflect on the strategy’s efficacy, Moran said. That’s when “the idea of just using the outreach groups came about,” along with the switch to a longer survey timeline.

Now, about 20 volunteers from Rock the Block, Northwest Hospitality, the Coffee Oasis, and the HEART and REAL teams are given a week to ask the county’s unhoused population where they are staying on the last Thursday of the month, working about six hours a day, every day, until January 30.

The teams have found that many unhoused people can be found in the day where they will be staying later in the night, Moran said. So sending out teams to knock on tents and RVs at 5 a.m. isn’t necessary anymore.

The change in the project’s timeline and personnel could yield more accurate results, though some unhoused people are sure to fall through the cracks.

Having a whole week instead of just one day gives the surveyors more time to find unhoused people, said Northwest Hospitality Director Anton Preisinger, who has participated in the count for years. And, having those surveyors be social service workers who are well established with the homeless community encourages more engagement in the process than if it were conducted by community volunteers.

The providers can draw on established relationships to document more demographic information about unhoused people they encounter, Preisinger said, and this empowers them to ask unhoused people for others who aren’t present at an encampment that they know are usually around.

“There's a risk to sharing some of this information about where you're staying” that is perceived by homeless campers, Preisinger said. “People seem more likely to share that information with the outreach teams that they work with on a regular basis than they had been with private volunteers.”

The service providers can also connect unhoused people they survey with resources and hand out snack packs and hygiene kits, being representatives of those agencies themselves, who specialize in housing, healthcare, mental health and substance use treatment, Moran said. Because of their experience in the field, the social service surveyors are in a safer position than community volunteers.

This year, the compact group of surveyors have a group text, which allows them to share information in a more streamlined fashion, said Rock the Block member Dawn Michele Wilson, who has participated in the count for several years. The surveyors can do safety checks, tell each other where they’ve been and which areas to circle back to, and ask if other providers know where certain campers might be.

The collaboration has been “pretty powerful” as compared to the previous model, which was essentially “just a free for all,” Wilson said. “This year is the first year that that coordination, I think, has really paid off. All of us feel pretty confident that we got most of those who may have been missed in the previous counts.”

With more time and more field knowledge this year, Wilson and other volunteers have been able to search more remote encampments as well and document campers she calls “survivalists.”

Surveyors reached an encampment situated a mile straight uphill with a creek running down the middle of the trail, Wilson said. She and her survey partners have contacted people they’d never met before who were deep in the woods who were not receiving services. Wilson was speaking with a  young man while conducting the survey and sensed that he was stressed. When she asked him about it, she discovered that he’d scheduled a social security psyche evaluation the next day, but had no way to get there. Wilson quickly coordinated with Gather Together Grow together and arranged a ride for him to his appointment.

Where are the individuals from former Bremerton encampments?

One crowd of campers seems to be missing from the count, however.

When the Salvation Army opened its 75-bed overnight shelter on November 1, the City of Bremerton cleared growing homeless encampments on MLK Way, Broadway and Eighth Street, in accordance with their recently enacted unauthorized camping ordinance. That night, the shelter saw about 40 overnight guests.

About 50 to 60 people were staying in those encampments and could’ve been counted all together, Preisinger said. “Now, they're scattered to the wind.”

The campers who were originally staying in groups on the public streets broke off individually while a handful headed to the Salvation Army on the adjacent street. Since November 1, Wilson reported that there were 40 people from the encampments that she could no longer find whom she’d had been in contact with in her work with Rock the Block.

It wasn’t until the Point in Time count that she’d seen any of those missing 40 campers. She only found two.

“I was very grateful to see them and they were very grateful to see us,” Wilson said of the two campers, one of which is in Bremerton while the other has relocated far outside of the city limits. “We worry about them: ‘Where did you go? Did you end up going with family? Did you end up moving to a different state? Are you in jail? Are you in the hospital?’ We, as outreach workers, don't get a lot of closure a lot of times.”

Aside from the two contacted by Wilson, she, Preisinger and Moran haven’t found any other unhoused people who were previously staying at the large Bremerton encampments.

“They're either accessing Salvation Army or they're just extremely difficult to find,” Moran said. But Wilson, who is a board member at the Salvation Army, says she hasn’t seen anyone on her list when she makes her frequent visits.

“They're not gathered together in those larger groups that make it easier for us to provide resources to them where they are,” Preisinger said. “It's so much harder to find people and maintain those relationships throughout the year, but also way harder to find them for this week’s count.”

It’s not for a lack of trying, either. The surveyors are searching underpasses, side streets and behind buildings in all corners of the County from Seabeck to Kingston to Bainbridge Island to Pendergast Regional Park, Moran said. Every section of the county has a designated group.

As the search for the MLK Way and Broadway campers seems inconclusive, Wilson finds she must turn her mind away from them.

“We all try not to think about it because we'll just lose our minds over it – it's very stressful, you get attached to these people,” she said. “Really the only way to carry on and go forward is to just compartmentalize it and move on. And in your head, you just visualize the best:maybe they went home to mom and dad, finally.”

What data will the Point in Time deliver?

The census data from the Point in Time count will likely be available around March, after the team “de-duplicates” and records the data, Moran said. The resulting number will provide feedback on the county’s state of homeless services and its surveying method – but some providers would like to see more direct impact on local resources as a result.

Borg hopes that the count won’t report an increase in unhoused people.

Last year, the count reported that there were 245 unhoused people in the county, but Moran’s list of names usually reflects a much higher number, he said.

Wilson also believes that the 245 person estimate is “not even close to accurate,” so if the 2024 count reports what appears to be an increase, she thinks that could be a good thing.

“There are probably considerable pockets of people who do not want to engage with resources and are better at hiding in the community and being avoided by outreach teams, so there's definitely people out there that we miss,” Preisinger said. “I'm not sure  how to close that gap in years to come.”

Preisinger believes this year’s survey strategy is the best approach so far to get an accurate number, which could reflect an increase from last year. But, Preisinger hopes the surveying method won’t change again and risk reporting a drastically different number that could signal a trend to HUD that isn’t necessarily the case.

Preisginer finds it hard to conduct the survey year after year without a deliverable to offer its unhoused participants.

“It would be nice to show them something one of these years where you shared all this information over the past few years and we have these new shelters funded by money from HUD that are now open and they're providing services in different ways and here's a tiny home shelter that would actually serve your needs,” Preisinger said.

“There's never been a line drawn between the two,” being the census data and responsive funding from HUD, Preisinger said. “ haven't really seen any increase in services in all the years that I've been here.”

Once the count comes out though, the county will have a much clearer view of how the homeless community has been impacted throughout the year. A decrease in the reported population could show that homeless services are making a large impact, or demographic data could show that many of the county’s homeless have migrated from larger metro areas, Borg said, but all of that will remain unknown until the numbers come back in March.

“I'll be interested to see the numbers,” Preisinger said. “I feel like this is a step in the right direction.”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Point in Time homeless count in Kitsap using providers over volunteers