Abstract:
Over the past two decades, a variety of methods have been used to count the homeless in large metropolitan areas. In this paper, we report on a recent effort to count the homeless in Los Angeles County, one that employed only a sampling of census tracts. A number of complications are discussed, includingB the need to impute homeless counts to areas ofB the CountyB not sampled and to take the relative costs of underestimates and overestimates of the number of homeless individuals into account. We conclude that despite their imperfections, estimated counts provided useful and credible information to the stakeholders involved.B Of course, not all stakeholders agreed.