Many Americans quickly walk past homeless people they see on the street, refusing the recognize them, to many they are invisible. Homeless people deserve the same dignity and respect as all people. Everyone deserves to have shelter, food, and water. Therefore it is our responsibility to make sure all people are given resources to survive. Through the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development the Hud’s Homeless Assistance program identifies and counts unsheltered homeless people with the goal of planning future services, justifying and allocating resources for programs for the many different subgroups of homeless people. The program also raises public awareness and community involvement. An unsheltered homeless person according to HUD resides in a place not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks, transportation hubs, tent cities, sidewalks and abandoned buildings. Encampments are areas where unsheltered homeless people live. people are harder to count because they are not living in emergency shelters or transitional housing. Many unsheltered homeless people still receive services such as street outreach teams, drop-in centers, health care for homeless networks, soup kitchens and mobile van food programs. There are a variety of approaches to collecting data on unsheltered homeless people. Approaches include direct street counts with or without interviews and data collection from service programs who may not be readily found in public places. Applied Survey Research (ASR) has helped its partners secure additional federal and state funding through its homeless census and survey data! The 2007 San Bernardino County Homeless Census and Survey counted a total of 7,331 homeless people plus 133 persons reported in County-wide Domestic Violence shelters. The total of all unsheltered individuals and families was 6,111. This means that there are only 1,200 homeless people in shelters in San Bernardino County. Below are a variety of bar graphs taken from the study.
“Community Action Partnership of San Bernadino County.” San Bernadino County 2007 Homeless Census and Survey. Community Action Partnership America’s Poverty Fighting Network, n.d. Web. 9 Feb. 2014.<http://www.appliedsurveyresearch.org/storage/database/homelessness/sanbernardino/San_Bernardino_2007_homeless.pdf>.
The research you did was amazing! It is crazy to hear the actual numbers for this area. One third of the people who need help are getting help. It is astonishing that there are not more ways for people to receive help, especially in San Bernardino County which is one of the poorest counties in the United States.