We Heart Seattle raises concerns over King County’s new homelessness count method

Earlier this week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) began its federally required point-in-time (PIT) count — an annual estimate of how many people are unhoused in the county.

But Andrea Suarez, the executive director and member at large with We Heart Seattle, raised several concerns regarding how the PIT count is conducted.

“[The count] adopted a peer-based seed method that taps into social networks for the homeless to turn themselves in over a two-week period and say, ‘Hey, I’m homeless. I’ll take a $25 debit card and go tell three of my friends to come turn themselves in, then I get five more dollars for each person that comes in and turns themselves in as homeless.’ They are not required to provide a Social Security number or ID, so it is subject to some integrity issues.”

Before this change, a PIT count was conducted by approximately 600 volunteers spread across the county between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., documenting the number of homeless people they saw. The volunteers were assisted by paid “guides” who had experienced homelessness in the past and whose knowledge could help locate homeless people off the beaten path.

This data is widely understood to be an undercount.

“The issue is that the person who’s supposedly homeless, in a doorstep, in a tent, is going to actually make it all the way back to their homeless camp peer group and hand them this bar-coded piece of paper somehow on the way to probably needing to trade their gift card in for drug money,’ Suarez said. “I mean, that’s the reality of the population that certainly I’m working with. So it does concern me that we’re relying on people to turn themselves in who are homeless.

“The methodology has some benefits, and that allows the surveyors to ask why you’re homeless, what are the barriers?” Suarez continued. “Are you from here? What do you look for in a shelter? Those kinds of things which are important to bettering the system, right?”

We Heart Seattle is a nonprofit that prepares sites for trash and debris removal throughout the city, recruiting volunteers for trash cleanups. Many of the sites are defunct, abandoned, or cleared-out encampments within public spaces.

“I believe, in life in general, unless you’ve seen it for your own eyes, question everything,” Suarez said. “Especially in this day and age with a lot of misinformation, we need to go back to a one, two, or three-day point in time [counts] where we see for our own eyeballs who’s out there in the tents, on the slopes, under bridges. That’s how you get an accurate count of people not utilizing services, shelters, tiny houses, and hotels.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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