Each January, a group of volunteers spend three days getting a count of how many people are homeless in Salem.
Last year, before Elaine Lozier became the director of Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance, she was a volunteer. She was interviewing someone to collect the data and, through the questions, realized that she was speaking to a victim of sex trafficking.
“It hit me pretty hard on, like: ‘I don’t have the training for this,’” she said.
Invasive questions and a lack of support for the people answering and asking them contributed to Lozier’s decision to skip the count this year. With the pause, the organization wants to find a better way to collect and manage data about people without housing in the Salem area, and measure outcomes when they do it next year.
The Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance, which started in 2019, provides community-wide planning, coordination, and collaboration of local and tribal governments, school districts, nonprofits and stakeholders to meet the needs of homeless people in Marion and Polk counties.
It took on the duty of conducting the count for the first time last year, which found 878 total unsheltered people living in the community, and 677 in shelters, a slight decrease from 2022 which counted 879 unsheltered people and 926 in emergency shelter.
Every January, the count sends volunteers to do face-to-face interviews with people living in cars, parks, sidewalks and abandoned buildings.
It’s required in every odd-numbered year by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that funds housing and homeless services. But many communities, including Salem, have historically done it annually. Community organizations and over 200 volunteers are needed for the effort which reaches tucked-away corners of the city.
Interviewers ask unsheltered people questions including where they plan to sleep, their ethnicity, gender, if they’ve served in the military, drug and alcohol use and health. Everyone has the right to refuse answering, according to the Alliance’s volunteer guide.
Lozier said the organization learned a lot from their first year conducting the count, namely that she wants it to better fit their efforts with current resources and needs of the community. They will still be doing a sheltered point in time count, which measures how many people are staying in emergency shelters or transitional housing.
The decision comes after a year of state investment in homeless services, which helped open Salem services like The ARCHES Lodge and the navigation center, and as Kotek plans to ask the Legislature for another $600 million for housing and homeless services.
“We have various systems right now that we’re trying to align, but the problem is so big and growing so fast, and then the resources are also growing. So it’s a wonderful time, I think, to take a look at what our needs are as a community, what does homelessness look like and then how do we respond effectively,” she said.
The point-in-time count isn’t the only measure of Salem’s homeless population. Data is collected every day when people use shelters and services, and organized in the state’s Homeless Management Information System.
Lozier said the count includes invasive questions about people’s experiences, like whether they’ve experienced domestic violence, and often things they’ve already told a service provider at some point.
“They’re being asked to tell their stories over and over and over again. And if you’ve ever done a PIT count, if you’ve ever seen those questions, they’re extremely personal,” she said. “If people were to ask me those questions, I probably wouldn’t actually tell all the answers because it’s pretty private. Or if I did, I would feel pretty vulnerable.”
The agency is hoping to improve the experience next year by pairing it with resource connection for needs like housing, food or shelter.
Polk County Commissioner Jeremy Gordon, chair of the alliance, said future counts could look more like the “community connect” events in rural Polk County, which have opportunities for haircuts, health care and veterans services while collecting the required data.
“It’s a big community event to wrap our arms around people who are struggling with homelessness,” he said.
Volunteers usually lead the effort, and a major coordinator for the area is the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency. Director Jimmy Jones said he supports the decision to only do a sheltered count this year.
“The count can be traumatic for our homeless population, who once a year have to support a census, answering the same questions, which can be trauma-inducing and deeply personal,” Jones said in an email to Salem Reporter. “We have a massive amount of current data on our homeless population, and the incremental benefit of additional information here in January of 2024 is not worth the high personal cost of these invasive questions.”
Lozier also hopes better data systems will show how resources, especially newer ones, are impacting people’s experience with homelessness over the next five, 10 and 15 years. She wants to better track how long people are staying in stable housing and how people are adjusting.
“Homelessness looks different from person to person, and we can capture that. I think it will help us set a strong baseline that we can track over time,” she said.
Gordon said it’s unfortunate that they’ll have a gap in the data, but that the decision will benefit the community and services in the long run, and that there’s an overreliance on a data source that reflects a three-day period and can be thrown by variables like bad weather. He hopes they can develop a more consistent system.
“It’s unfortunate that, we as a society, just use the (count) as a marker for our progress,” he said. “It’s not a super reliable data source to be honest.”
Over the next six months, Lozier said the Alliance will discuss goals for what to track and what progress they want to see with their partners, including the action agency and the Center for Hope and Safety.
Though some of the questions are required, the alliance has room to customize and to add their own. Lozier wants to add some that will improve the experience and connections to resources, and better prepare volunteers.
“Now is the time, in my mind, to build an infrastructure and methodology that will last for years and years and years,” Lozier said. “The problem is growing so quickly, and (count) numbers can reflect that to a certain extent, but, again, we have other tools.”
Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-575-1251.
SUPPORT OUR WORK – We depend on subscribers for resources to report on Salem with care and depth, fairness and accuracy. Subscribe today to get our daily newsletters and more. Click I want to subscribe!
Abbey McDonald joined the Salem Reporter in 2022. She previously worked as the business reporter at The Astorian, where she covered labor issues, health care and social services. A University of Oregon grad, she has also reported for the Malheur Enterprise, The News-Review and Willamette Week.
