On a chilly, clear morning by the railroad tracks south of downtown San Jose, a team of case managers in gray hoodies approached Raul Flores, who’d spent the night before on the street a few blocks away.
“Are you hungry?” one of them asked.
In exchange for answering a few questions — did he have any health conditions, had he recently stayed at a shelter, how he became homeless — they offered Flores a $10 McDonald’s gift card. He happily agreed.
“If I was able to work, I wouldn’t be out here,” the 44-year-old San Jose native explained.
Flores took part Thursday in Santa Clara County’s every-two-year homeless count, which seeks to tally everyone living in tents, cars or other places not meant for habitation, as well as in homeless shelters.
The federally mandated “point-in-time” census, conducted over two days this week, will help determine public funding for local homelessness programs. It also collected demographic and other survey data that officials say is crucial to informing their homelessness response.
“It’s one data set that helps provide valuable information about people experiencing homelessness,” said KJ Kaminski, head of the county’s Office of Supportive Housing, its lead homelessness agency.
Next week, Contra Costa, Sonoma and Napa counties will also conduct homeless counts. Preliminary results are expected to be released in the spring or summer. The Bay Area’s other five counties will take their estimates next year.
The counts come as the Bay Area’s estimated homeless population soared 46% over the past decade to a record 38,891 last year, despite unprecedented billions spent to bring people off the streets. The surveys have found people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups are often overrepresented in local unhoused populations.
Experts and advocates say that while drugs and mental health challenges are significant drivers of homelessness, the crisis will persist across the region until it can add more affordable housing and find ways to ease the burden of rising housing costs on its low-income residents.
“We need to make those robust investments to make sure people aren’t falling into homelessness at the rate they currently are,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
At least every two years, counties nationwide send teams of volunteers and outreach workers to count the number of homeless residents in their communities over one or two mornings in January. The goal is to count unhoused people when they’re sleeping or less likely to be moving from place to place. Still, there’s widespread agreement the efforts generally yield an undercount, in part because some encampments can be hard to spot, and it’s often difficult to estimate the number of people living in tents or vehicles.
To ensure its count is as accurate as possible, Santa Clara County used a new app for volunteers and outreach staff to log their tallies in real time and focused more teams in areas where homeless people were most likely to be staying.
“We think it will improve the accuracy and gather even more information from people experiencing homelessness,” Kaminski said.
In 2023, the county identified 9,903 homeless people. That was a 1% dip from the previous count but the largest homeless population in the Bay Area.
After COVID-19 paused all homelessness counts in 2021, Santa Clara County, in an effort to better understand the impact of expiring eviction moratoriums and other emergency programs, counted in both 2022 and 2023 and now counts only during odd years. Meanwhile, Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin and Solano resumed counting in even years. Contra Costa, Sonoma and Napa now count every year.
County officials said that even though they count on different schedules, the estimates happen frequently enough to provide a useful snapshot of homelessness across the region. All Bay Area counties also conduct a yearly count of homeless people in shelters.
In a statement, the Contra Costa County health department said that while it counts more often than some counties to better assess its programs and policies, “collaboration and data-sharing across counties ensure that efforts remain aligned.”
In San Jose, Flores finished up his survey interview and pocketed the McDonald’s gift card. He told a reporter that he can’t find steady work because of a mix-up with his social security number. He said he was unwilling to stay at a group shelter nearby because he wouldn’t be able to bring all of his belongings.
Asked what he would buy with the gift card, Flores replied, “I’m gonna save it — for when I really get hungry.”