King County, WA counts homeless population amid freezing overnight temperatures

King County begins annual count of people experiencing homelessness

As overnight temperatures hover near freezing, King County is tallying the number of people experiencing homelessness in its latest Point-in-Time count.

SEATTLE - Starting Monday, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and volunteers are taking a tally of how many people are unhoused. It’s all part of the federally required point-in-time count, and it comes as overnight temperatures have remained near freezing in King County.

"Seattle in King County is one of the, you know, the top five cities in the nation that has really deep unsheltered homelessness issues," said William Towey, Associate Deputy of Strategy at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

Local perspective:

Every other year, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority conducts the point-in-time count to get a snapshot of the homeless population. In some places, that involves volunteers counting each person unhoused. However, King County has adopted a different method.

"We moved away from simple volunteer headcounts because they consistently undercount people, and today we use respondent-driven sampling, which is a public health research method that we've implemented here in partnership with the University of Washington. It produces more accurate estimates and much better information about who is actually experiencing unsheltered homelessness," Towey said.

"You tap into social networks and have homeless people turn in other homeless people using a seed method, and those people turn themselves into these intake centers, and are incentivized to do that with either a $25 or $50 gift card," said Andrea Suarez, founder and executive director of We Heart Seattle. "Twenty-five dollars being a single, $50 when a family turns themselves in as homeless."

She told FOX 13, some of her staff participated in the count on Monday.

"It's important to also have a variety of volunteers that maybe don't also come with bias," Suarez said. "I think having organizations that aren't funded by the government is an important group to have at that table, and ‘We Heart Seattle’ absolutely represents that, we want an accurate count."

She adds, she likes how the method allows them to get more information about a person, but she does have some concerns.

"We're not actually going outside and laying our eyeballs on the human beings that proclaim to be homeless," Suarez said.

By the numbers:

Towey said every year, they engage with more than 50,000 individuals experiencing homelessness, and unfortunately, aren’t able to meet the needs of every person.

"So, each year, unfortunately, more people become unsheltered on our streets. And the past few years of pit count have shown that number increasing, and we expect that to be the result of this year's count as well," Towey said.

The count runs through Feb. 6th and those in shelters are accounted for, according to Towey.

"For example, the last time we did this, we had 16,000 folks who were unsheltered in community, and about 5,000 or 6,000 of those folks are in shelters," Towey said.

"I think it's important that viewers and data collectors understand that there's two different types of people that we proclaim as homeless and we have a service resistant population that are suffering from untreated mental illness and drug addiction and broken relationships, and until we have a plan on how to address the service resistant, codependent, drug addicted population, no matter how much money and how much resources and how much counting we do, we don't have a plan for those people who create the havoc into our communities and are a great danger to themselves and other we're never going to solve this problem," Suarez said.

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