photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Volunteers helping to conduct Lawrence and Douglas County's point-in-time count prepare to head out from the East Lawrence Amtrak station at around 6 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024.

The federally mandated annual count of individuals experiencing homelessness in Lawrence and Douglas County took place Thursday, with volunteer teams having wrapped up the bulk of their survey work by midafternoon.

The point-in-time count is conducted each year by state agencies as mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it’s intended to give a picture of how many sheltered and unsheltered homeless individuals are in a community on a single night in January. In Kansas, the count is facilitated by the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, which covers 101 of the 105 counties in Kansas.

Work to conduct the count in Lawrence began early Thursday morning. Six teams of roughly six to eight people — consisting of social service providers, law enforcement, city staff and other volunteers — fanned out from the Amtrak station in East Lawrence shortly after 6 a.m. to canvass sections of the city and county. Those groups conducted surveys with any willing participants they encountered, the data from which is required by HUD to determine a community’s level of funding eligibility.

Those coverage areas were determined based on places where known homeless camps are located, and teams were given maps that plotted out routes between them using city GIS mapping data. The maps also included “reported locations,” which were generated by reports filed through an online form for reporting new homeless camps that the city launched in October.

Kristen Egan works with the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition as its regional coordinator for Douglas County, and she was one of the people who organized the local count. When the Journal-World spoke with Egan shortly after 2 p.m. Thursday, she said those volunteer teams had hit all the “hot spots” on their maps.

“I think it was really efficient,” Egan told the Journal-World. “We’ve learned some for next year … and to only be eight hours in and this far along is really good.”

Egan said there’s still work to be done, though. Some volunteers went out again to revisit locations known to have higher traffic, and surveys were conducted not just out in the field but at various social service and sheltering agencies, including the Lawrence Community Shelter. Guests at the shelter had an opportunity to participate in the survey Thursday morning, and Egan said staff there would be offering another chance in the evening to catch anybody who may have missed that earlier opportunity.

Egan said transitional housing units are also included in the count of sheltered homeless individuals, but they have until Friday to report.

Though the work to conduct the count is nearly complete, Lawrence and Douglas County shouldn’t expect to know exactly how much data was collected for a while. Last year, it took until October for the area’s numbers to be reported publicly. Misty Bosch-Hastings, the city’s Homeless Programs Coordinator, told the Journal-World that numbers from the count are due to HUD by May at the latest, which could mean that putting a number to Thursday’s work takes at least until midway through the year.

But a common refrain from Egan and others working in the unhoused sphere is that the final point-in-time tally shouldn’t be taken as a comprehensive picture of a community’s homeless population, in part because people can simply choose not to participate.

One reason for that reluctance to participate is that the survey asks some personal questions. But there’s also some unique data being collected for Lawrence and Douglas County this year, Bosch-Hastings said, pertaining to how long participants have been in the community and what they feel caused their homelessness. The question about how long participants have been in the county, for example, includes options of zero to six months, seven to 12 months and longer than a year.

That’s intended to give some more insight on one issue looming over the area — that neighboring communities are transporting unhoused people to Lawrence and leaving them here.

“I’m interested in it, as well,” Egan said. “We’ve all heard people say that people are being bused here. I don’t think that’s true, but I’m interested to see the number of people that have been here less than (six months).”

Editor’s note: The Journal-World was invited to follow along with one of the survey teams that conducted the point-in-time count Thursday, which visited sites near downtown and in East Lawrence. A future story will outline the experience of conducting the count and explain in more detail how — and why — it’s performed.