Published on July 7, 2022
Since the data-driven Marc Dones was hired to lead the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority, one of their main priorities has been to get an accurate count of the homeless population. Now, Dones and the Authority have two different counts: 13,368 and 40,800. Both are larger than the previous estimate of the homeless population conducted in 2020. They didn’t want to have two counts. But the federal government mandates one of them, and the Authority says the other is more accurate.
Once the Authority learned that a count in 2022 was required, it had to pivot quickly. The typical way to count unsheltered homeless people, by walking around the entire county, is labor- and time-intensive. Zack Almquist, a sociology professor at the University of Washington, said he suggested to the Authority a new way to conduct this year’s Point-In-Time Count called “respondent-driven sampling.”
The idea, Almquist said, is to find the ratio of sheltered to unsheltered homeless people in King County. Then, from the total number of sheltered homeless people in the county, which is already tracked, they could extrapolate the unsheltered population.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times.
Originally written by Greg Kim for The Seattle Times.