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As a numbers & data person, it drives me crazy that there isn’t an agreed upon way to quantify the number of homeless families in San Francisco. It is more difficult to see and count homeless families than homeless adults; families remain out of sight for their safety, and are less often visibly unsheltered. Meanwhile, many city departments maintain different definitions of homelessness; a family the school district considers homeless may not be homeless according to the city shelter system. To address a problem like the housing crisis that has dire implications for children and families, we need to honestly measure the scope of the problem; and collectively refer to the same number. Yet, everywhere I look, the numbers are opaque, conflicting and incomplete. (For more in-depth information on issues with counting, check out this report that Compass Family Services worked on in coalition with a group of other local providers.)
In May, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) released preliminary findings from the biannual Point in Time (PIT) count, which aims to provide a snapshot of unsheltered homelessness in the city. The 2024 San Francisco PIT count revealed a staggering 94% increase in homeless families since 2022 (437 this year vs. 205 in 2022). The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers the PIT count the most accurate reflection of unsheltered homelessness.So, does the recent family PIT increase get us closer to a real count? It's true that the figure is more aligned with what I see at Compass every day: a lobby full of families with nowhere to sleep that night. But is it a sign that we’ve fixed our data problem? Well, yes and no.
Historically, the biannual family PIT count has mostly been a census of how many families are staying in shelters (87% of families captured in the 2022 PIT count were in shelters). Because unsheltered families often try to stay out of sight for the protection of their children, they aren’t visible when volunteers do the visual part of the count, looking for people on the street. When the counters look at vehicles and tents at night, they assume there is just one person in each, even if there are more. Thus, the count of family street homelessness is virtually non-existent, despite the on average 300+ families waiting for shelter every night (511 as of July 26, 2024).
So what changed in 2024? Compass and Catholic Charities partnered with HSH to call through the lists of families on the various shelter and housing waiting lists the night of the street count to ask if they were homeless that night. If they picked up their phone and confirmed that they were unsheltered that night, they were counted. That's why we see the increase - because we tried harder to count people.
Don’t get me wrong, family homelessness is increasing; the higher 2024 count is not solely due to the improved methodology. Outside of the PIT, there is other administrative data that could help us see the full picture. The closest true measurement is the number of families that are assessed for homeless services. It is an exact total of the number of families verified as homeless within San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s own database(See that number, here.). But this number is rarely invoked by policy makers or journalists. I look at this number regularly and there are over 1,650 families so far this fiscal year that have been identified as unsheltered, a 34% increase from last fiscal year, and a much bigger increase than the 143 unsheltered families in this year’s improved PIT count.
For better or worse, the PIT total directly correlates to the amount of federal funding San Francisco’s homeless response system receives to provide services. As long as this is the case, we will have to get creative on how to accurately count people on that one night every two years. HSH and homeless service providers must work together to publicize the count and encourage families to be counted. How often do you pick up your phone when you see an unknown number? I’d guess not very often. The same is true for unsheltered families. We know that a few hundred families did not pick up their phone and were not given the opportunity to confirm or deny whether they were homeless that night. Think about the attention and resources that the Census puts into outreaching to ‘hard to reach’ populations in the year leading up to the count. They care because money is attached to those numbers.The same is true for the PIT count. The implications are local, too: when Mayor Breed saw the dramatic increase, and the advocacy around addressing the needs of homeless families, she moved to increase investment into the family system via the unprecedented Safer Families Plan.
So let’s count better. Let’s resource the PIT to truly count the number of families with no safe place to live. Let’s uplift the assessment numbers to track homelessness in an ongoing way. Most crucially, let’s acknowledge the true scale of unmet need so we can resource honest, effective solutions.