Area’s homeless to be counted again

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Dec. 20, 2004 | 11:12 a.m.

After not having any hard numbers on the Las Vegas Valley's homeless since 1999, local private and public agencies and the federal government will soon be able to quote from two censuses of the less fortunate among us conducted within a nine-month period, according to a county official.

The county will be paying UNLV researchers about $26,000 to count the homeless in January, repeating a task carried out in April of this year, according to Shawna Parker Brody, analyst at Clark County Resources Management. The census is being done to meet a federal funding requirement, she said.

"Unfortunately, we're doing it so soon after the last one that it may not be so useful," Parker Brody said of the upcoming census.

Both counts are just that -- counts -- with no additional information about the homeless population being gathered -- no information about ages, race, ethnicities and problems such as addictions or mental illness.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development asked local governments to count the homeless earlier this year in order to qualify for annual funding that goes to private agencies, although a requirement had been established to conduct censuses in odd-numbered years.

The push was due to the lapse in five years since the last count, Parker Brody said.

After April's count, officials estimated there were about 7,800 homeless men and women in the valley, up from the 1999 count of 6,700.

Parker Brody said she expects that rising apartment rental rates and mortgage costs, together with massive conversions of apartments to condominiums, will likely drive up the numbers of homeless men and women in the valley, but not as soon as January.

"I don't think we'll see the impact of this quite yet," she said.

Her agency works with local nonprofit organizations in applying to HUD for what's called Continuum of Care funding every year. The 2004 application was for $6.8 million and the results of that application will be announced sometime this month, Parker Brody said.

UNLV sociology Professor Fred Preston, who headed up the 1999 count but not the one in April, said the two recent efforts will be "essentially the same -- we'll be fanning out over Clark County and counting everyone we can."

The count will take place on one night in January and will rely on 400 volunteers, including students and advocates.

The researchers also will try to estimate how many families are "doubling up" or living with other families, based on Clark County School District data.

Preston said the count also will include homeless shelters, which do have additional demographic and other data about their residents.

Parker Brody said that HUD requires such additional data about the homeless -- along with raw numbers -- from municipalities around the nation, but allows each jurisdiction to decide how to gather that data.

She said doing a complete census -- with interviews of each person counted -- would cost more and take more time. So the valley's application will use demographic data gathered from a one-day event held in the fall of each year called the Homeless Stand Down. In that event, several thousand people, most of whom are homeless, get free services and fill out surveys about themselves.

Survey results from 2004 will probably not be ready by the end of January, so those of 2003 will probably accompany the raw count, Parker Brody said.

Preston said it "would be more helpful for agencies (that work with the homeless) to have more complete information" gathered in the same census.

Parker Brody said this should be possible in 2007.

"For now, we're mostly just meeting the requirement," she said.