Census workers will fan out Wednesday night across the Bay Area, and in cities around the country, to count people experiencing homelessness — some of the hardest to reach residents in the nation’s once-a-decade population tally.
County officials and homeless service providers have been working with the U.S. Census Bureau for more than a year, providing lists of places where unsheltered people can be found. But some are now voicing frustration that the bureau is disregarding their advice and familiarity with the Bay Area’s homeless communities, and worry the count will be incomplete.
“When the bureau is sending out people to walk into encampments late at night, it’s going to be incredibly difficult because we’re not allowed to be there. We’re not allowed to leverage our relationships,” said Nicholas Kuwada, manager of Santa Clara County’s census outreach office. “It has made it incredibly difficult to plan and to work with the bureau.”
But census officials say they’ve counted the homeless before and they know how to get it done. As in the past, the count happens in a three-day blitz — Sept. 22-24 — and includes visits to emergency shelters and soup kitchens, as well as an overnight count of people living outdoors or in vehicles.
The staff of temporary “enumerators” were trained last week on safety and cultural sensitivity, and equipped with masks and hand sanitizer, said Tim Olson, the bureau’s associate director of field operations.
“This is my fourth census,” Olson said. “It literally does [all] occur during those three days. We have approximately 40,000 people doing this enumeration [nationwide].”
But the COVID-19 pandemic upended most planned census operations. The homeless count was originally scheduled for late March, but was postponed because most of the country was sheltering in place to prevent the spread of the virus. Even today, six months later, the ongoing pandemic continues to create major obstacles for getting an accurate homeless count.
Soup kitchens that used to serve sit-down meals in large halls, and where enumerators came to collect information from many people, now offer grab-and-go food. And local officials have been trying to move people out of group shelters and into hotel rooms, dispersing the population and making the count more difficult.
The changes make collaboration with local partners all the more important, said Casey Farmer, Alameda County’s census outreach coordinator. So she’s frustrated that census officials have not shared their plans, ostensibly to protect the privacy of the people they’re counting.
“We feel blind that you won’t tell us which encampments you’ll go to,” Farmer said. “Community groups have been asking, pleading, the local census office to set up appointments, so they don’t surprise folks.”
Olson said the bureau does still schedule its visits to organized shelters and meal providers.
But Farmer and others say encampments are another matter. And they are upset that the bureau is set on going out overnight to knock on tent flaps and the doors of RVs.
Candice Elder, executive director of the East Oakland Collective, which provides food and services to about 500 people a day across 30 Oakland encampments, said she consulted camp leaders early on about the census count.
“Hands down, they said, ‘This is a crazy idea, to come into an encampment during the middle of the night when people are sleeping or doing who knows what, and disturb people,’” said Elder. “No unhoused person was in favor of it.”
Elder said she wrote to the local census office and requested scheduled, daytime visits, but was denied.
“My fear is that people will not get counted and that will lead to really important resources not getting to the unhoused community,” she said. “The census data is what people rely on for the next 10 years. We want to have as accurate a count as possible.”
Bay Area advocates and county officials also question whether the Census Bureau has enough staff, after reports that it began laying off enumerators in early September.
And they say they wish census officials would allow homeless outreach volunteers to accompany the enumerators, to foster trust, as they did for the last census.