Moving homeless individuals out of parks and large encampments, and into temporary housing is a first step of what may be a long and complicated process. The ultimate and most difficult goal here is to get people into permanent housing.
Los Angeles County’s annual homeless count is a civic ritual bringing thousands of volunteers together in a common cause. It is also a reckoning with the shortcomings of all that’s been done to salve the county’s most perplexing human crisis.
So its cancellation this year due to the risk of spreading the coronavirus has had a multifaceted fallout a loss of civic engagement, uncertainty over how much the COVID-19 pandemic has added to homelessness and, possibly most consequential, the potential loss of federal dollars that would be triggered by a higher count.
But for those who see sharp and timely data as a keystone in the fight against homelessness, the hiatus has created an opportunity to reimagine a process that is inherently blunt and slow.