Teams Fan Out Across Pasadena to Find and Count the City’s Homeless

Over 100 volunteers will fan out across Pasadena on Wednesday to locate and count Pasadena’s homeless in a study which will both measure recent “success” in abating the problem and support more funding the city will receive to continue addressing the phenomenon.

Fuller Theological Seminary’s Office for Urban Initiatives has partnered with the Pasadena Partnership to End Homelessness to conduct the 2016 City of Pasadena Count and Subpopulation Survey, which is part of a larger nationwide effort of about 400 such surveys this month.

“The Count and Survey are important in the ongoing effort to end homelessness in Pasadena,” said Dr. Sofia Herrera, Associate Director of the Urban Initiatives Office, because they support local grant requests “submitted to the federal government for funding of local services.”

In addition to documenting the scale of homelessness, the volunteers also collect demographic information, such as age, history of mental illness or military service in order to customize the city’s response to current needs, said Urban Initiatives’ co-founder Joe Colletti.

“We do it within the last ten days of January annually,” he said.

Earlier this week, Herrera explained that trained volunteer counters would be sent out in teams of two’s and three’s early Wednesday from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and again in the evening from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Homeless youth will be counted from 3 to 5 p.m., she said.

The city has been divided into 16 zones, and each will be systematically searched, Herrera said.

Urban Initiatives reported in 2011 that the count of the homeless subpopulation in Pasadena was 1,216. A year later the number dropped to 904. In 2013 it went down again to 772, and again in 2014 to 666. Last year, their final report (which was published in April of 2015) showed that there were 582 adults and 50 children without stable residence in the Pasadena community, for a total of 632 sheltered and unsheltered residents.

“Over that same time period, the number across L.A. County went up about 30%. So, although we are having some success here in Pasadena, the overall number is really large,” said William Huang, Housing and Career Services Director for the City of Pasadena. “632 homeless people in Pasadena – which only 23 square miles – is way too many.”

“We have a lot of work to do, and want to continue to focus on the things we have been doing in the last four years, which are activities that either prevent homelessness, or end homelessness one person at a time,” Huang said. “Our focus is to provide permanent supportive housing, which means we want them to have a permanent apartment, and the services to address the root cause of why they were homeless in the first place.”