This conversation aired in the October 15, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
This month, Bay Area counties will start to release the full results of their 2026 Point-in-Time Counts, or “PIT” counts of people experiencing homelessness. The preliminary results were released earlier this summer, but the full reports go deeper into demographic details, like age, race, gender, and veteran status. Alameda County’s full report is scheduled to come out next week. But every two years, when these numbers come out, KALW’s homelessness reporter Alastair Boone asks herself the same question: Who’s included and who is left out?
This year, she talked to experts about the invisible forms of poverty and homelessness that are hard to capture in the biannual count — and the costs of failing to include them. She shares with Crosscurrents host, Hana Baba what she learned.
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Interview Transcript:
This month, Bay Area counties will start to release the full results of their 2026 Point-in-Time Counts, or “PIT” counts. The preliminary results were released in May, but the full reports go deeper into demographic details, like age, race, gender, and veteran status.
Alameda County’s full report is scheduled to come out next week.
But every two years, when these numbers come out, KALW’s homelessness reporter Alastair Boone asks herself the same question: Who is included in the Point-in-Time count, and who is left out? This year, she talked to experts about the invisible forms of poverty and homelessness that are hard to capture in the biannual count — and the costs of failing to include them. She’s here to share what she learned.
Conversation transcript:
Hana Baba: Hi Alastair.
Alastair Boone: Hey Hana.
H: So you’ve been covering homelessness for a while. Remind us, what the PIT count is?
A: Point-in-Time is that one night in January when volunteers go out and count all the unhoused people they can see — and officials count how many people are staying in shelters.
And any city, or county that wants to receive federal homelessness funding has to do it.
It’s also an important data point if you’re a journalist covering homelessness.
H: What made you want to learn more about it this year?
So back in May, I went to a press conference in Oakland where Alameda County officials were announcing the preliminary results of their 2026 PIT Count. And people like D1 Supervisor David Haubert were celebrating, because the numbers showed a 13% decrease in homelessness since 2024.
DAVID HAUBERT: Can I get an amen to that?
CROWD: Amen!
DAVID HAUBERT:: We are making good progress, however, our work is not done yet.
H: I remember hearing about this: the PIT count said there were just over 8,000 unhoused people in Alameda County?
A: According to the PIT count, yes. But at the end of the event, Jonathan Russell, the county’s Director of Health, Housing and Homelessness said something that stuck with me:
JONATHAN RUSSELL: It's also important to note that the point-in-time count doesn't represent the full picture of who experiences homelessness over the course of a year in our community. For context, more than, uh, twenty-five thousand people touch the homelessness system each year, right?
A: He said 25,000 people touch the homeless service system every year.
H: Twenty-five thousand?
A: Yes. Over three times the number of people who were captured in this year’s PIT Count.
H: What does that mean? I mean, I have heard people say that Point-in-Time is an undercount, but how come the PIT numbers are so different from what Jonathan Russell said?
A: Well to answer that question, I kind of had to go all the way back to the beginning of the Point-in-Time Count, in the 1990s.
CBS REPORTER: Census workers are out tonight in some cities trying to complete the first ever attempt to count America’s homeless. The census director said opening night was an overall success. But critics charged that for every homeless person questioned, many others were overlooked or undiscovered.
A: The first real attempt to count homeless people was made by the Census Bureau in March of 1990. It became the Point-in-Time Count later. And from the beginning, it was criticized for undercounting people.
H: If it has always been criticized, why do we do it?
A: Well, I asked that same question to Jonathan Russell. He’s the county’s homelessness director, who we heard from earlier.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: I mean, the Point-in-Time Count, I think it does a few things well. I think it mobilizes the community around a collective action to support their residents and, and connect with them.
A: He says: getting over 1,000 people together to connect with the homeless people in their city is a good thing. And, he also appreciates the data itself.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: I describe it as consistently imperfect. So as imperfect as it is a benchmark that has been done consistently across communities. It is a helpful snapshot for the morning of that day that we do it.
A: But Jonathan knows that the count doesn’t capture everyone.
H: Well, yeah. Doesn’t everyone know that it’s more or less impossible to see and count every homeless person on one day?
A: Yeah, I mean HUD acknowledges that it’s only supposed to provide a snapshot. And even with tens of thousands of volunteers fanning out all over the country, unhoused people can be hard to find. It’s very easy for volunteers to miss people. And some homeless folks are deliberately hiding for their safety.
But, there’s also another factor that makes it difficult for the PIT count to capture every unhoused person, and that is that it uses a narrow definition of “homelessness.”
H: You mean they’re missing people on purpose?
A: I mean that the count is designed to mostly capture a certain type of homeless person.
H: Okay, say more about this.
A: So, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, is the agency that facilitates the PIT count now. And HUD primarily defines an unhoused person as someone who is “literally homeless.” So they live in a tent, or a car, or a park. Or, that they live in a homeless shelter.
And according to HUD, it was defined this way in part with the goal of making sure that the government’s limited funding goes to the people with the highest need.
H: Well that makes sense. We want to support the folks who need the most help.
A: Yes, that does make sense. But critics say it also deliberately misses thousands and thousands of people who do experience homelessness in our communities throughout the year — and who can’t be pointed at and counted on the night of the PIT count.
H: Okay, break it down for us.
A: Let me play you some of my interview with Jonathan.
REPORTER: What is your personal homeless count?
JONATHAN RUSSELL: I think, at least it's safe to say that probably more like 25 to 30,000 people a year experience some form, however short, of homelessness.
A: Alameda County has a system that captures everybody who uses a program that is intended for unhoused people. It’s called the Homeless Management Information System — or, “HMIS.” That’s where Jonathan’s 25,000 number comes from.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: So that 25,000 rough number is longitudinal. It includes the course of a year.
A: So when he says 25,000 people touch the homelessness system, he’s not just talking about one single night in January. He’s talking about the whole year. And the number of people who use these programs — like housing and shelter programs — has exceeded 20,000 for the last five years.
H: But if they’re in housing programs, are they actually homeless?
A: Well, it depends on how you define homelessness.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: So we have about 7,000 of that 25,000, are people that are in permanent housing programs for the course of that year.
REPORTER: So they're not literally homeless, but they would be homeless without support.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: Correct. Yeah, so it goes to show how much of our homelessness system is sustaining people that we've housed in, right? To, to keep them in housing.
A: So they would be right back outside without subsidized housing.
But, that still leaves 18,000 people who are literally homeless. People who sleep in shelters, or use other programs, over the course of a year.
H: And so why aren’t those 18,000 people being counted in the PIT count?
A: Well, like I said before, some people are just really hard to find. But another big reason is because a lot of people are “doubled up”, — living with friends or family. Or, might have enough money to stay in a hotel room for a night or two. And these people do not fit the HUD definition of homeless.
H: So the PIT count is important, but it doesn’t give us the whole picture. Let me throw a question back at you — what’s your personal homeless count?
A: Well I'm going to avoid your question a little…. I personally like to think about homelessness as a spectrum. Many people live in fluid housing situations. And in reality, it’s hard to draw the line between “homeless” and “housed” for folks who may be living in unstable housing, and could become “literally homeless” anytime based on the circumstances of their lives.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: The vast majority of homelessness is precipitated by economic events in people's lives, shocks to their system, breaks in family relationships that have economic circumstances. And that is just all over in the data.
A: UCSF did this study a few years ago and they found that the majority of people who become homeless for the first time hadn’t been on the lease where they were living previously.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: Eviction is not the most common pathway into homelessness. It's usually part of a story that someone is on a spectrum to continually more precarious arrangements.
A: But whether or not you’re on a lease is a weird way to define homelessness. For example, in a lot of cultures, it’s common for families to live in multigenerational homes, where most people aren’t on the lease.
Also: I think about my circle of friends, a lot of people don’t have their name on the lease. But a lot of them would have somewhere to go if they lost their housing, or lost their job.
Jonathan really stresses that not everybody has networks like my friends do. For some people, everyone in their network is in a precarious situation.
JONATHAN RUSSELL: it's the way in which economic impoverishment, um, has dislocated and fractured whole communities, right? So it's actually the impoverishment of networks, not just individuals, right?
A: So another way to look at homelessness is what if your personal network doesn't have the resources to keep you off the street?
H: What other data can we look at to get a bigger picture?
A: Well I already told you about HMIS. There’s also public school systems, which keep data on families that self-identify as homeless. For example, last year across the country, twice as many people told the school system they were homeless compared to the numbers in the national PIT count.
H: Wow, that’s a big difference.
A: Yeah. And the PIT count has been changing to try to tell a broader story. In 2024, volunteers with Alameda County’s PIT count started collecting surveys during the count. So now they’re talking to people, and asking a list of questions about their experiences and their needs, instead of just doing a tally. And surveys like this are becoming more common.
H: I can imagine that that would help us understand why someone might be homeless, not just that they live outside.
A: Yeah. But this tension between the numbers and the people we’re talking about is something that the country has struggled with from that very first homeless count.
CBS REPORTER: Some wanted to be counted
UNHOUSED MAN: I wanted to be counted man, I’m a human being man! I count, regardless!
A: This is a CBS report from 1990.
CBS REPORTER: Some of the men and women who huddled in the dark places were never found.
UNHOUSED MAN: If they did find me, it would be more help. Not only for me but for everybody else, too.
A: There is a lot of nuance involved…but the experts I talked to said the question of “who are we counting” when we count unhoused people is a good place to start when we think about building solutions.
H: Thanks Alastair.
A: Thanks Hana.
