Austin-Travis County's federally required homelessness count to happen this weekend
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Early Sunday, hundreds of volunteers will hand count how many people experience homelessness in Austin-Travis County, during the Point-In-Time (PIT) count.
The bi-annual count is a federally mandated method of hand counting the number of people sleeping outside, put on by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO).
It involves volunteers breaking into teams, asking people at night to unzip their tents and exit their cars, wake up off their spots on Austin’s sidewalks, and answer questions passed down from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
"It's...one of the key ways that we gather data about our unhoused neighbors, where they are, the resources they need, and where it is that we should be funneling money," said Angela de Leon, ECHO director of operations.
ECHO asked for roughly 900-1,200 volunteers to help with the count, including 75 team leads. Those groups will meet in the early morning hours Sunday to comb the Travis county area looking for people experiencing homelessness.
"We kind of give direction about how to engage with unhoused individuals and then we set them out to their assigned sections, and they canvas," de Leon said. "It's old school knocking on doors, if you will, where we're asking folks various questions about what they need, how they've come to their current situation, and how we can best show up to support."
But the PIT count is not the holy grail of data collection — and is a well-established undercount, something ECHO has been clear about previously.
During the 2023 count, more than 2,300 people were identified as being homeless in that overnight count, we previously reported. Of those, around 1,300 were people sleeping outside or in cars and around 1,100 were people sleeping in shelters or transitional housing.
ECHO has also been using a system for years where service providers — think outreach groups and emergency shelter workers — plug information into a centralized database as they go. It uses that data to more accurately estimate homelessness in Austin on a given night.
"The PIT count is something that we do specifically to capture that loophole of folks who maybe aren't engaging directly with the homeless response system," de Leon said.
You can find ECHO's latest data here.