The Federal Government requires counties to do a Point In Time count of homeless people in their county. However, they do not provide funding to make these counts happen and they do not look into the results any more than seeing if it was simply completed or not. One question you may ask, how do they fund these counts if the federal government does not provide any funding? These counts are sponsored by non-profit organizations and some cities and counties contribute money. Another question that may occur, if the federal government is not taking these counts very seriously then why should the counties that are doing the counts take them seriously? Through the results of the PIT counts over the last decade or so there are trends that demonstrate which counties are counting just so they can check off the requirement and those who are actively counting to make sense of the data collected. There are often counties who are in denial about the number of homeless and they claim they have less than what they really do have. Then there are also some counties who collect more data beyond just if someone is homeless or not. They look into other demographics so that they can better understand why homelessness is a problem and what they can do to fix it. For example, cities with better social services attract homelessness. This is something worth looking in to because that would be an explanation of why a cities number of homeless is high.

There are multiple different methods that Applied Survey Research uses to count homeless, which include; street count, shelter and institution count, telephone survey, and homeless survey. With these different methods, PIT counts are not always accurate and it would be hard to compare two cities counts if they are using different methods.

PIT counts are important for counties to participate in but only if they are doing them accurately. With the right funding and the proper method of counting we could understand homelessness better.

http://www.appliedsurveyresearch.org/homeless/