The homeless population in Orange County is majority white, but people of color are vastly over represented when compared with the general population.
That’s one of several key findings revealed in the 149-page final report from Orange County’s 2019 homeless Point In Time count released Tuesday, July 30, to the Board of Supervisors.
The overall numbers from the “Everyone Counts” effort are the same as reported back in April from preliminary data: 6,860 homeless people in Orange County. That’s a 43 percent increase from 2017, in part because of a jump in homelessness and in part because of more accurate methodology — electronic mapping and a 28-question survey — to count them.
But the final report presented Tuesday also includes details about the demographics of who is homeless, and on sub-groups within the homeless population, such as families, seniors, young adults and military veterans.
Read the final 2019 Point In Time report
The board also received a 30-page document, “Marching Home: A Strategy to End Veteran Homelessness in Orange County,” that outlines steps to end homelessness among military veterans by December 2020. The Point In Time count recorded 311 homeless veterans, more than two-thirds of them without shelter.
Read the Marching Home strategy
The board, led by Chairwoman Lisa Bartlett, directed the county chief executive’s office on Tuesday to dedicate $200,000 toward hiring one or more housing navigators to assist 80 veterans in Orange County who hold vouchers that will subsidize their rent but can’t find anything available — or a landlord willing to accept a voucher.
“They need somebody to help them,” Bartlett said later in an interview.
Susan Price, the county’s director of care coordination, also said that other efforts have led to the placement of 20 homeless veterans a month, culled from a registry the county created, into permanent housing. Right now, the registry has 295 names.
By the numbers
The report points out that when a separate head count was taken Jan. 22 in shelters and transitional housing programs around the county, there were 738 empty beds — enough to accommodate nearly 20 percent of the 3,961 people Point In Time volunteers recorded a day later on the streets. The biennial survey, mandated by the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, was conducted this year in the morning and evening hours of Jan. 23 and 24.
Also among the findings in the report are numbers that show individuals who are black, African American or multi-racial, as well as Hispanic or Latino families, make up a disproportionate percentage of homeless people, given their numbers in Orange County:
— 8.41% of the homeless people without shelter here are black or African American, a demographic that the U.S. Census has historically shown accounts for only about 2 percent of the county’s population.
— 12.24% of the unsheltered are described as “Multiple Races” ( no definition provided) or “Other,” compared to 3.5 percent overall.
— More than half of homeless families, 57.7%, were Hispanic or Latino, compared with 34.2% of the county’s general population.
White people, however, represent the largest single group of homeless people: more than two-thirds of individuals with and without shelter.
The survey also found that more men — 4,310 or 62% — are homeless than are women, 2,536. But the report said that nearly equal numbers of homeless men and women had some kind of shelter.
Sub-populations
The Family Solutions Collaborative, a coalition of about 20 nonprofits that provide family services in Orange County, made a special effort to reach homeless families and include them in the Point In Time count.
Typically, during a street count, homeless families go underrepresented because they are more difficult to identify, according to the report. Homeless families are more likely to be sleeping in vehicles or other places out of the public’s eye, where they feel safer, or may be scrambling between temporary living quarters, such as motels.
The family collaborative outreach identified 466 homeless families countywide, a number that included 966 children. Most of those families — 366 — were sheltered. More than half of the 110 families without shelter lived in a car, van, truck or recreational vehicle in disrepair, according to the report.
Looking at two groups at opposite ends of the age spectrum, the report identified 612 homeless senior citizens 62 and older, nearly half of them chronically homeless; there were 275 homeless young adults ages 18 to 24, designated as Transitional Age Youth, and half of them were Hispanic or Latino.
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