Homeless to be counted

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004 | 11:08 a.m.

Groundwork will be laid this week for the Las Vegas Valley's first census of the homeless in four years, but one of the obstacles private and public experts will have to overcome will be how to pay for it.

The count, last done in 1999, is required by the federal government to compete for funds that help the homeless -- up to $4 million total, said Shawna Parker Brody, analyst for Clark County Community Resources Management.

Parker Brody -- who writes the annual application for the Housing and Urban Development funds -- said the agency has required urban areas to complete a census for some time, but Southern Nevada has not been in compliance with the requirement.

"We've known we needed an up-to-date census for at least two years," Parker Brody said. "If we don't do it now, we could lose points on the application, which would mean no new programs and barely funding existing programs," she said.

Public and private officials who work with the homeless will meet Thursday to plan the census.

The federal housing agency put its foot down on the census policy during a recent meeting with local officials to discuss a controversy over 2003 funding -- only $1.6 million was awarded, the lowest amount ever granted and about half the amount sought. The lack of a census was given as one of the reasons for the drop in funding, Parker Brody said.

Not doing a census during the next three or four months would jeopardize this year's funding, she said.

But doing it will pose significant challenges, including locating a source of funding, several hundred volunteers and expertise in evaluating the data. Thursday's meeting will include officials from Clark County's finance and social service departments, Nevada Health Centers, a nonprofit that operates clinics for the homeless, the city of Las Vegas and Catholic Charities.

Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, a Washington-based group, said that other urban areas nationwide were also told to carry out a street and shelter count in the coming months.

"What HUD is attempting to do -- and I commend this -- is find accurate numbers for the homeless," Whitehead said. "From a planning perspective, we need this."

Whitehead said "very few communities have kept up with" counts of the homeless. He also said such counts should be at least partially publicly funded -- "as long as it doesn't take away from services.

"The answer," he said, "is to increase the amount of funds spent on homelessness."

Bo Bernhard, now assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was a graduate student when he worked on the 1999 census of the valley's homeless.

He said he now tells his students that counting the homeless "is the ultimate research project.

"How do you find, survey and count people who want to be invisible?" Bernhard said.

The researcher said that a statistical formula borrowed from counting animals in the wild was used to help make sense of the numbers taken from surveys in the street during a two-hour period late at night.

"In the wild, that which is visible does not reflect the entire population, and it's similar with the homeless," he said.

The six-month, publicly funded study relied on 200 volunteers and estimated the valley's total homeless population at 6,707.

From 1999 to 2003, the estimated overall population in Clark County went from 1.3 million to 1.6 million -- a 22.1 percent increase -- according to State Demographer Jeff Hardcastle.

Having current, complete numbers obtained with methods comparable to the 1999 survey would be valuable, Hardcastle said.

Bernhard agreed. "In the Las Vegas Valley," he said, "having up-to-date numbers is our best tool against creating policy for yesterday."