This week’s classes focused on how our society keeps track of the homeless population. It seems like it would be quite a hard task and it can be because they are not registered with the area they live in and take up residence in any place they feel safe enough to live it. On Tuesday we got to have a Skype session with two experts who are involved in finding and counting the homeless for their records. We got to hear the different ways this takes place. Then for Thursday we choice a city and researched on our own the statistics of homeless for that city. By analyzing the data I found, I got to understand better the variety of information that is found from the city.

The area I chose was Fresno Madera Point in Time count for 2013. There are a variety of ways that cities try to find our how many homeless individuals are living this their city, and Fresno used two of these methods. These were the survey and tally volunteers who participated. This Pit count took over four months to complete. The basic statistics are that there are 594 sheltered homeless and 2,537 unsheltered homeless.

Depending on the city there can be a wide range of how serious the count is taken. There needs to be one every two years, but if the city does not care as much they may do a count and estimate at the same time. If city really cares they will do there best to count how many homeless there are, and then from that data use resources to go towards shelters and programs to try to get people off the streets.

http://www.appliedsurveyresearch.org/projects_database/homelessness/

POINT IN TIME COUNT 2013 – Fresno Madera Continuum of Care