Pasadena To Skip 2021 Homeless Count

The city’s Housing Department will not conduct the years-long practice of counting people experiencing homeless in January.

According to the department, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has approved the city’s request for exceptions regarding the 2021 homeless count, allowing the city to skip the count.  

The city, as the administrative entity for the Pasadena Continuum of Care (COC), typically collects data from people experiencing homelessness in unsheltered locations such as sidewalks, parks, and vehicles during the annual Point-In-Time Count in late January.

“The board came to this heavy decision due to concerns for the health and safety of our neighbors experiencing homelessness and our homeless count volunteers in the midst of a surging pandemic,” according to the City Manager’s newsletter.  

“Further,” the report continues, “this decision was supported by conversations with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, other regional Continuum of Care, the city’s Homeless Count Consultant, and other community partners. Ultimately, the Pasadena CoC Board determined that there was no safe way to gather the 200+ volunteers necessary to conduct the 2021 Homeless Count and collect data as thoroughly as it has done in previous years.”

Pasadena joins the Los Angeles and Glendale Continua of Care and other continua of care throughout the state and the nation in receiving approval from HUD to not conduct an unsheltered homeless count in January.

The decision is not expected to have any effect on the amount of federal or state funding for homeless services that the city receives as the administrative entity for the Pasadena Continuum of Care. 

The approved request only applies to the unsheltered portion of the count and the city will collect and analyze data for the sheltered portion of the homeless count as usual through an existing database. The Housing Department will continue to engage with local homeless service providers in order to assess the ongoing needs of people without shelter.

Data regarding people staying in shelters and transitional housing programs are collected through the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a database utilized by homeless service providers.

The yearly snapshot in time homeless count is used for a comparison to previous years to give officials an idea of possible trends, according to Huang.

However, this year the data would not be of much use as a comparative tool because it would have an asterisk due to the coronavirus.

The city included six concerns in its exception request: 

1. Concern for the safety and wellbeing of participants, community volunteers, and stakeholder agency staff; 
2. Concern about the ability to recruit and retain community volunteers and stakeholder agency staff within the same household or staff cohort; 
3. Concern about planning capacity and execution challenges with increased safety protocols; 
4. Concern that data gathered from the unsheltered count likely would not yield results that would be useful for planning as demographic data would not have been collected and the effects of the pandemic are not yet known in full; 
5. Concern about taking an unnecessary risk for a count that will not be as informative as numbers have been in previous years; 
6. Concern that conducting an unsheltered homeless count will divert staff from other critical work and lifesaving activities we are doing right now. 

The Pasadena Continuum of Care Board approved the full exception request to HUD for the 2021 Point-In-Time Unsheltered Homeless Count on Dec. 7.