Pasadena’s Homeless Count Gets New Leadership

When the homeless count begins today it will be with new leadership.

Dan Davidson, chair of the faith community committee of the Pasadena Partnership to End Homelessness, will now lead the count.

Davidson replaces Joe Coletti and Sophia Herrera who led the count in past years.

“They’re really being called into statewide work on homelessness and the housing crisis,” Davidson said. “So as they’re moving forward with that, they were looking for someone to come and coordinate and do some of the work they’ve had been doing.”

The count, which continues tomorrow, takes place in specific locations where there are services for people experiencing homelessness. The results will be available in April or May.

“As far as the methodology goes, it’s by and large the same,” said Jennifer O’Reilly Jones, Pasadena’s homeless programs coordinator. “We have made a few minor tweaks. We still will be canvasing a hundred percent of the city’s geography. We still attempt to engage with and survey every person that we count. The changes that I would point to are our evening shift on Tuesday evening, we shifted it back a half an hour, so it will start at 8:30 p.m. and run to 10:30 p.m. instead of going from 8 to 10. We did an analysis of the busiest times during our count shifts and that 8 to 8:30 time was slow. We also were getting feedback from volunteers that as the shift was ending at 10 o’clock in prior years, they felt like it would’ve been better to stay a little later.”

That isn’t the only change coming to this year’s count.

A case manager, outreach worker or other representative from one of the local agencies that provides services to people experiencing homelessness will go out with the volunteers.

“In the past, we would have regular volunteers cover zones and the professional volunteers cover the parks and the areas outside the zones,” Davidson said. “Now we’ve included one of those professional volunteers on the regular teams in the zones themselves. That’s so that hopefully they feel confident and supported if they run into a situation where they’re not able to really engage or something like that.”

The volunteers will also hand out kits containing toothbrushes, feminine products, first aid kits, gloves and socks as a small incentive to help people open up to them during the survey.

The 2019 count recorded 542 people experiencing homelessness in Pasadena, down from 677 in 2018. Only 2016 had a lower count, when 530 homeless people were counted.

The count in Pasadena has shown a decrease in the local homeless population in almost every year since 2011.

Last year’s count revealed veterans comprise only 6 percent of the homeless population in Pasadena.

The number of families with children on the street, which has been declining since 2017, continued to fall. Some 14 percent fell into this count category.

The 6 percent that are unaccompanied youths, between the ages of 18 to 24, is also characterized in the summary as a “positive low.”

Though the raw number of homeless in Pasadena is down, the number of those suffering chronic homelessness increased and accounts for approximately 50 percent of the total population counted.

Chronic homelessness is characterized by people with a disabling condition that have been homeless for more than a year.

While the homeless population decreased in Pasadena in 2019, it skyrocketed in LA County. About 59,000 people are living on the streets of Los Angeles County. About 16,000 of those people are living in their cars.

“As difficult as a survey is and asking private questions is, we do hope people engage and we want to increase that because that improves the quality of our data, so we can be more confident in our numbers because those numbers determine quite a bit when it comes to funding and improvement to different services,” said

Under the second change,” Davidson said.