The nation's first census of homeless people, at best, was a hit-and-miss operation.
While officials of the U.S. Census Bureau pronounced the effort a success Wednesday, reports from communities large and small indicated the overnight campaign to count street people and shelter dwellers frequently was botched.
Census Bureau officials said the results of the homeless census, which involved about 15,000 census takers assigned to visit more than 20,000 locations, will not become available until next year. Within hours after the dusk-to-dawn effort concluded, however, critics were saying that the census is not likely to resolve the decade-long debate over how many Americans are homeless. Estimates have ranged from a few hundred thousand to a few million.
Many of the more than 200 field enumerators who fanned out across Orange County expressed surprise that more people weren't discovered living on the streets.
"I think we've read too many stories--they had us believing the homeless would be swarming all over the place," said Joe Montes, Fullerton census district manager. "We could be coming face-to-face with an exaggeration of the (homeless) population. We'll find out when we pool our numbers."
But homeless advocates answered that such perceptions are inaccurate.
Susan Oakson, coordinator of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, said she suspects that census takers missed several pockets of Orange County's homeless people, who have been estimated to number upwards of 10,000.
"This is a huge job for the Census Bureau," Oakson said. "Many homeless people were missed. It's difficult to find people sleeping in their cars, for instance. It's difficult to distinguish the homeless living in low-cost motels. There is just not a perfect system for doing this."
Oakson said it would be wrong to surmise that Orange County is relatively free of homeless people based on the tales of census takers who returned from the field Wednesday morning. Unlike the highly visible street people of other urban areas such as Los Angeles, the homeless of Orange County tend to melt into the backdrop of society, particularly as night falls, she said.
But even in such urban strongholds, critics were charging that the count had missed a sizable chunk of the homeless population.
