It helps to think of the point-in-time count, or PIT, the way you would think of an election poll: as a snapshot of one corner of one moment in time and not as a complete picture.
PIT is an annual counting of people experiencing homelessness. During the last week of January, volunteers in communities all over the country will visit the streets, shelters, and other places where residents without permanent stable housing are likely to be, to inquire about their situations.
The data these counts return are helpful, but far from perfect, says Melissa Carlyle, operations director of the Catawba Area Coalition for the Homeless, or CACH, in Rock Hill. In the past, PIT counts were done on paper surveys and Carlyle said the process was clunky and inefficient.
“At the end of the PIT count, all the county coordinators would just send their surveys down to Columbia,” she said. “Columbia would compile that data and then send it to HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], and we would get very general data.”
General, as in, for the whole country, and usually 10 months after the count.
“We couldn't see the specific data about our counties,” she said.
Since Carlyle took over as the PIT count’s leader in York, Lancaster, and Chester counties two years ago, CACH has used a phone-based survey to get more data and be able to see what CACH volunteers collected that is relevant to the region.
With more immediate access to key data points, like where someone is spending their nights or what kinds of health conditions they might have, Carlyle hopes to be able to more quickly identify the amount and type of need someone might have.
But data collection is also about trends, some of which she finds alarming.
“One data point we've tracked, that we're really interested in this year, is the duration of time people experience homelessness,” Carlyle said. “Last year, over 50 percent of the people we surveyed had experienced homelessness for a year or longer, which is a really bad data point. But it's something that we can track from year to year to see how our new programs are actually reducing the time people experience homelessness.
Carlyle wants the information found in the PIT count to break misconceptions too.
“We want to know employment status,” she said. “That’s a big one, just because it's a common misconception that people experiencing homelessness are lazy and not working. In the past two years, we've been able to collect data that proves otherwise. The majority of people we're working with either are employed, are ready, or actively seeking employment.”
For PIT count volunteers like Hakim Diaz, who works as a Rock Hill housing navigator, the count has a personal resonance.
“I remember the first time I did it, it was pouring out,” Diaz said. “It was windy, cold, January, here. And I was like, ‘Why'd I do this?’ And then I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I know why I did this.’”
He did it because he remembered stories his mother told him about moving to the mainland from Puerto Rico in the 1950s. She didn’t speak much English and had few connections in her new home, so it was hard for her to adjust, he said.
Moreover, Diaz said that people like his mother get overlooked because they get separated from society at large, the way a lot of people dealing with homelessness get marginalized.
“Underrepresented, marginalized people … need protection and need help,” he said. “[They] need policies that swing their way. And the only way that we could do that is to count the number of homeless people so … so federal funding can come into the communities.”