Photos: Volunteers Survey San Diego’s Homeless Population

This post originally appeared in the Jan. 27 Morning Report. Subscribe to the daily newsletter here.

About 1,600 volunteers fanned throughout the region early Thursday to tally the county’s unsheltered residents.

Outreach workers, volunteers and politicians crouched up to tents and ventured into canyons and under bridges throughout the county to survey homeless residents.

As the Union-Tribune reports, the point-in-time count led by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness is an annual effort to learn more about the demographics and needs of the region’s unhoused population. The census is mandated for communities to receive federal homelessness funding.

As our Lisa Halverstadt has reported, the point-in-time count is broadly considered a minimum count of homeless San Diegans but was once considered the foremost data point on the problem each year.

In more recent years, other data points from the Task Force – including the number of people accessing homeless services and the pace of people falling into homelessness for the first time – have shed more light on the scope and nature of the region’s homelessness crisis.