Counting the homeless

A thundering helicopter and high-tech gadgetry were used to try to count every homeless person in the Las Vegas Valley this morning.

The Herculean effort was launched by the city of Las Vegas as a precursor to the 2000 Census.

The count done at the beginning of every decade since 1790 determines how much representation each state will have in Congress and guides federal agencies in allocating funds.

About 285,000 census workers will attempt to count an estimated 275 million Americans.

"The homeless are one of the difficult populations to count," UNLV sociology Professor Fred Preston said. "From a census point of view, they are hard to count because they don't have addresses."

Most Americans will receive census forms in the mail next March. The forms should be mailed by April 1, which is Census Day. From April through June, census workers will visit homes that did not return the forms.

But Preston, who is heading the UNLV study, said extraordinary efforts must be taken to account for homeless people.

Given the stakes in this census -- Nevada is likely to get another representative in Congress if the count bears out the state's recent growth -- the homeless have taken on a new importance.

In addition for every Nevada resident not counted in the 2000 Census, the state will miss out on $165 a year in federal assistance.

During the last census about 29,000 Nevadans, most of them living in Clark County, were not counted. That cost the state about $45 million in federal assistance during the last decade, Ken Johnson, manager of the Las Vegas Census Office, said.

That's why the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson and Clark County kicked in $50,000 for the homeless study.

"If the Census in 2000 comes up with a much lower number than we come up with in this study, we can use our data to contest the government's numbers," said Bill Arent, supervisor of Las Vegas' Neighborhood Development Division. "In 1990 (the Census Bureau) grossly undercounted the number of homeless people."

Tuesday night and early this morning, crews traveled through alleys, homeless shelters and parks trying to count homeless people.

Mike McClain, who has been homeless in Las Vegas since May 5, was one of those counted. "Some people are frightened of the homeless. Some people want to help," he said. "But they know we are here. Do they know what the numbers are? Well I really don't know."

McClain was one of the people counted by Marlene Richter. The director of social services at Catholic Charities spent part of her night strolling through her organization's shelter at 1501 Las Vegas Blvd. North counting homeless people.

Most of the men she counted slept on rubber mats stretched on the floor in a room smelling of sweat.

Census workers don't expect an accurate count to be an easy task -- and not just because of the difficulty in counting the homeless. During the 1990 Census Nevada ranked last among the 50 states in the response to the forms sent to residences, Johnson said.

"There are a lot of reasons for this. One of the reasons is that we are a very diverse state," Johnson said. "But the main reason for the undercount is that we are growing very rapidly."

The rapid growth combined with a high transient rate results in Southern Nevadans not developing the sense of community that is more prevalent in other metropolitan areas, he said.

For example in Omaha, Neb., 94 percent of the people returned their census survey forms in 1990. In the Las Vegas metropolitan area only 51 percent returned them.

"Nevada is a much different state than Nebraska. In Nebraska, people live in their homes for 25 or 30 years. That is very uncommon here," Johnson said. "People are constantly moving here. They are also constantly moving out too."

That's not the only problem growth creates in getting an accurate count, Jeff Hardcastle, of the Clark County Comprehensive Planning Department, said.

"The Census Bureau has developed a list of addresses that they plan to send forms to," he said. "The community is growing so fast, that you may have whole neighborhoods get built between the time the government develops its address list and actually sends out its forms."

To combat this problem, Hardcastle said local governments are reviewing the addresses before the forms are mailed.

A third factor making the count tougher is the nature of the economy, Johnson said.

"Las Vegas is a 24-hour town," he said. "Just think about it. In the middle of the night 13 percent of our workforce is still working."

Arent said the city chose to count the homeless between midnight and 4 a.m. because people are not moving around as much at that hour.

The UNLV researchers chose to broaden the hours of the survey Wednesday to 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

"In most cities, that is the ideal time. The bars are usually closed by 2 a.m. and people have settled in for the night," Arent said. "But Las Vegas is a 24-hour town so it will make it more challenging to get everyone counted. But we still think that is the best time to locate as many people as possible."

Results of the homeless count are not yet available. But local social service providers have long contended that there are about 17,000 homeless people in Southern Nevada.

Later this summer, the UNLV researchers will do a second, more in-depth street survey. In that survey researchers will ask a smaller sample of homeless people questions about their backgrounds and their specific needs.

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