For this interview, KSMU’s Gregory Holman is joined by Kavahn Mansouri, investigative reporter with Midwest Newsroom. That's a collaboration between NPR and some of the public radio stations in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Recently, Kavahn has been reporting on ways the U.S. tries to count homeless individuals, and some of the implications for communities in the Midwest.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GREGORY HOLMAN: Kavahn, welcome to KSMU News.
KAVAHN MANSOURI: Thanks for having me.
Q. So let's start out just on the basic level, what is the point-in-time count and how does it try to help efforts to relieve homelessness?
A. Yeah, the point-in-time count is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's annual census of America's homeless population. And basically how that's done is over a single night, there will be a street count, where volunteers throughout the country will go out and seek out individuals who don't have housing, and this is typically during very cold evenings, and that's kind of intentional. And they try to get a count of how many people are living outside without proper shelter.
And then there's also, in some places — not all places, — a count following that week that's called a “service count,” where they basically count people who are in shelters and things like that.
And it's basically done to give the federal government an idea of what the census population is looking like, any trends they can identify, and also where funding should go. So when a county in Missouri, for instance, goes out and does this count, they send that information to HUD.
HUD, then, you know, decides where funding will go to support homeless people in the next year or so. And that's how they’re kind of informed, but it is done through volunteers. Kind of a bit of a hectic thing. There are studies that have shown that the count is a little bit inaccurate in some ways.
Q. This January, Kavahn, you actually embedded yourself with two point-in-time volunteers in the Jefferson City area, as part of your reporting. Their names are April Redmon and Christina Willard. What did you learn from that experience working there with April and Christina?
A. Definitely learned about what it takes to go out and do that count, especially over a one night sort of period.
So we started at around 5 p.m. They gathered in a library in Jefferson City. They were expecting several teams of volunteers to show up, but at the end of the meeting, there were only four people — including themselves. So there were two teams to cover something like 1,200 square miles of Callaway and Cole counties.
And we basically got right to it. I jumped in the back of their SUV. And it was right after that big snowstorm that I think a lot of us will remember. And you know, they were going up treacherous ice hills while they still had some sunlight, try to get to places where they knew there should be some homeless encampments, but, you know, the first place we went, the people had moved on.
And then, you know, we started to lose light. And as the night went on, it was a real visualization to watch these two super-well-intentioned volunteers, who are doing this just because they want to help, go through woods in the middle of the night, through abandoned hotels and abandoned buildings. I think at one point we went through a Taco Bell drive-in to interview someone who was unhoused, who was working that night.
All basically with the idea that they need to be surveyed so more funding can come to help them. But the thing that stood out to me is the difficulty, the amount of times that they kind of came up empty-handed, especially when they knew people had been living in the places they were checking in the past.
That's something that April, you know, April Redmon especially, told me, is part of it: They know that they're going to miss people, and that's kind of the challenge of this one-night count.
I think at the end of the night, they said they counted around 13 or 14 people. And they had a “service count” in the following week. And I think after that — I mean, this will tell you a whole lot — that number rose to about 100-and-some-odd people who are counted in the area.
But they still believe that there are a lot of people who are out in the woods living in abandoned homes. You know, in that abandoned hotel, they knew someone was in there who just did not want to talk to them. So it's a big challenge.
Q. And it seems like that's a pretty typical thing for the rural areas. Just to underscore, you're saying that these two volunteers, just a handful of volunteers, were responsible for some 1,200 square miles of trying to count folks who might be unhoused in that area?
A. Yeah, that's right. And you know, this was basically in their SUV, darting around Callaway and parts of Cole County. They started at 5 p.m., they wrapped up at 3 a.m., just darting around different places. And that involved places they know or believe there should be encampments, or [where there] have been encampments in the past, talking to local sheriffs and police officers who know, and just going through the campsites and abandoned houses.
And it's really difficult because in a metropolitan area, when we think about St. Louis or Kansas City, or any of these Midwest cities, homelessness is pretty visible. You can see it. [But] even there, there is a population that you don't see, that is off the street and in places that you're not looking. And that's especially true in rural areas, because there's so there's so much. It's a vast area. We're talking about people who are living in the woods, sometimes for a very long time, not just temporarily. In some of the sites that I went to, it was so clear someone had been living there for some time. There were remains of tents or enough trash that you could tell that someone had been spending, weeks, if not months, there in that same place. And then, of course, winter plays a part in that as well. So a lot of people move when it gets very cold.
Q. Now, beyond that kind of aspect, of just people not necessarily being found, the experts with advocacy groups that are working on homelessness relief and even government agencies tend to find some distinct patterns of problems and criticisms with this point-in-time count every January. Kavahn, can you just kind of go over some of that aspect?
A. Yeah, we saw the sort of the ground level: these very well-intentioned volunteers struggling to identify homeless individuals and survey them the night of the count.
But that's just kind of one level of it, and that that doesn't lie on anyone's shoulders, really, but the real problems come sort of at the higher level.
So for instance, you know, in 2020 the Government Accountability Office released a report that basically said the way [HUD was] performing these point-in-time counts was really not the best way to do it.
Basically, Continuum of Care [regions], which are typically the organizations that run these point-in-time counts, they had a lot of different methods throughout the country. So you could go to St. Louis city, for instance — and this is just off top my head — and then go to, for instance, to the [Missouri Balance of State Continuum of Care serving most of the rural areas outside of St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield], and they might have two completely different ways of doing the point-in-time count and using that data.
So there's no overriding actual rules that HUD gives to a Continuum of Care to do the point-in-time count. So some [Continuum of Care regions] are doing just street counts. Some are doing street counts and service counts. Some people are doing a full survey; some people are just asking for a name. And with that data collection, there’s no through-rule that makes it all-encompassing. So that can be problematic.
Q. Well, just to recap there, so the federal Government Accountability Office said that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development basically has made inconsistent training. So the Continuum of Care for, say, the St Louis region could be doing things differently to the Springfield region, to the big Continuum of Care that's, like, all the parts of rural Missouri that I think is called [Missouri Balance of State Continuum of Care]. Is that basically the message?
A. Yeah, absolutely, that's right. And that was like the main line. But there's also just — when HUD gets that data, the Government Accountability Office, as well as many other advocacy groups, say that [HUD officials] don't give enough information back to the Continuum of Care organizations to actually make that data usable. So HUD gets the data, then they sort of hold on to it. And actually the data comes out a full year after the count. So you know the count data we got in 2024 in January was from January 2023, so that's year-old information that the public has received.
Q. Right. And so just to recap, we got the 2024 information just at the beginning of this year, and you found that in the four states covered by Midwest Newsroom — Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska — there were about 15,000 people [counted as individuals facing street homelessness]. Is that correct?
A. Yeah, right around that. But even that is sort of like, it's like looking at last year's data.
Q. So that's considered maybe one of these criticisms that folks like Government Accountability Office, or homeless advocacy groups might have?
A. Yeah, because homelessness is basically on the rise. That HUD count [released at the beginning of this year], that point-in-time count, basically showed that homelessness was up, I think it was around 18 percent. So as homelessness grows, there's this sort of lagging data. It does take time to count, so it makes sense that it comes out a year later. But yeah, it's lagging.
Q. If you're just joining us, I've been speaking with Kavahn Mansouri. He's investigative reporter with Midwest Newsroom; that's a collaboration between NPR and public radio stations in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Kavahn has been reporting on ways the U.S. tries to count homeless individuals to assist them.
Kavahn, really appreciate the time with us on Ozarks Public Radio today.
A. Thanks so much for having me.
You can find Kavahn Mansouri’s reporting on homelessness and the point-in-time count — and other reporting by our partners at Midwest Newsroom — on ksmu.org.
