Sonoma’s Point in Time homeless count questioned by advocates

Most every January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development coordinates with local officials to conducts a Point-in-Time survey of homelessness in a given area one day per year, a count that influences federal funding for unsheltered services. Some homeless advocates, however, find fault with this data collection methodology — so one local group started their own survey.

Using data developed through Airtable, a spreadsheet-database hybrid app, Sonoma Overnight Support has tracked the people who use its services for the past few years with the hopes of providing a more complete picture of homelessness in Sonoma Valley.

“You can't really make good decisions unless you have good data,” Francisco Kilgore said, a staff member at SOS who has helped gather data over the past year. “We've developed a robust data system that allows us to look at trends in terms of the amount of meals, and of the amount of people, and make decisions based on that.”

The Point-in-Time survey, on the other hand, is conducted over one night a year at the end of January, according to Sonoma County’s Ending Homelessness Manager Michael Gause. The survey used to be performed every other year, but the county turned it into an annual event in 2015. The 2021 count was paused due to the pandemic and 2022’s count has been delayed from Jan. 28 to Feb. 25 on account of the omicron variant.

In the county’s 2020 report, the PIT survey recorded its lowest homeless population in 10 years with 88 people experiencing homelessness in Sonoma Valley. But advocates say the unhoused population is growing in Sonoma Valley, exacerbated by the pandemic and rising housing prices.

“Our numbers and the county’s numbers were so far off, l’m like, ‘These numbers aren’t real,’” said Sonoma Overnight Support Executive Director Kathy King. “But then again, the money that they allocate to us were based on Point-in-Time. And then that's when I was like, ‘Oh my God, you cannot do this.’”

SOS recorded 190 unhoused people in Sonoma Valley in 2021, nearly double the PIT count from the previous year.

Gause has acknowledged that the PIT survey likely undercounts the unhoused population in Sonoma Valley, but he said problem arise because Sonoma Valley doesn’t have a year round shelter like Petaluma or Santa Rosa, making it more difficult to count the homeless population on a given night.

The accuracy of the count not only helps government agencies understand the breadth of the issue, but also determines the allocation of state and federal funds, Gause said. When it comes to homelessness, funding is far from simple.

“The overall numbers are used by some state agencies in determining allocations for some funding streams but that’s not broken down by jurisdiction, it’s just for the continuum care or the county writ-large,” Gause said. “Some of the new state funds have been more tied to overall numbers of count. And conversely, some of the HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) funds, to get more money or be more competitive, you want to see the count going down.”

The county could not provide a precise number for its allocation of funds for homeless services the county or for a regional area like Sonoma Valley due to the multitude of agencies involved in allocation and distribution. A public records request by the Index-Tribune on the exact dollar amounts could not be answered by press time.

Homelessness in Sonoma County was deemed a public health emergency by the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission in June, which noted in a press release that there is only one bed for every three unhoused people in Sonoma County.

“Homelessness has increased because, of course, the pandemic and because of ... the high cost of rents and the lack of housing,” said King.

Client data before the introduction of the Airtable app did not have a database, so it may not be entirely accurate, Kilgore said, but the number of meals SOS has served to homeless and housing insecure residents has grown exponentially.

SOS served more than 54,941 meals in 2020 to Sonoma Valley residents in 2021, according to their Airtable data, a greater than 35% increase from the previous year. King attributes this to greater housing insecurity and tighter budgets.

“They're working two or three jobs, and when one or two is taken away, they could still hang on. But then people have to make decisions. Do they buy food or do they pay their electricity bill?” she said.

Contact Chase Hunter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com and follow @Chase_HunterB on Twitter.