management tool. and are integrated into national reporting requirements for the fund -- the annual nofa funding applications that fund your federal programs here. one of the other enhancements we've done in particular in san francisco is to expand a face to face survey of homeless persons throughout the city in both sheltered and street environment. so, we've done our best to do administer a randomized sample of surveys and in this particular 2013 count, we administered roughly a thousand surveys to get qualitative information that gives some of the insights into the residency, to numbers of

chronic homeless, the subpopulation detail that's required for local planning and national reporting. there is also important other data that come out of the survey that's been cited earlier such as the residency and so on, and that's been expanded significantly since the beginning of the point in time counts. in 2013 in particular, a big enhancement is part of the continuous improvement effort in the pit count has been to comply with the hud requirements to better profile youth homelessness. and in particular, the development of a new reporting category which is transitioning age youth, which is roughly 16 to 18 through 24 which is a separate reporting group, and was not previously profiled

effectively in the county and which arose out of a national observation that the typical count logistics and methodology excluded certain groups such as families and especially children in their data collection efforts. so, thats was resulted in just under -- just around 00 additional persons found in the 2013 count that were in this unaccompanied youth category, the transition aged youth. so, there's just been an ongoing participation in these best practice reviews and we've seen a very good, steady increase in the qualitative efforts in the point and time count to more effectively profile and provide outreach

services during the count. the youth -- the youth in particular which was a special kind of independent outreach effort was with the cooperation of a lot of local service providers, of youth service, homeless youth services including larkin street as well as many others. and other outreach strategies targeting folks that are living in vehicles, living in the parks, in abandoned buildings and so on, and homeless that are difficult to find by our typical enumeration volunteers and participants. so, we'll have -- we've had outreach folks that have special knowledge of some of these hard to reach homeless to actively participate in the study and have improved the

overall quality. so, we feel in general that the comparative numbers with the methodology that's been employed in the last couple of counts to the 2013 count is consistent and enables good policy and strategic planning that will help inform the next version of the ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness. we were also asked to talk a little about our experience in some other communities and how san francisco is different or look a little different than what we've experienced elsewhere. in the communities that i mentioned earlier that we worked in in california, we found as opposed to the overall national reduction in homelessness that was found by the annual housing

assessment report to congress, that most of the communities that we worked in saw an increase in homelessness. >> supervisor mar? >> thank you for explaining the methodology. you mentioned people living in their vehicles, cars. do you have a sense of how many people are living in their cars or vehicles now and how that's changed over time? >> when i talk, i'll ask samantha to look it up on the chart. i don't have that committed to memory. >> and supervisor farrell says that we'll be getting some of the data. the other question is my district has most of golden gate park. how many homeless people, chronic and not chronic, live in golden gate park? do you have the ability to hone in on that geographical area? that data would be helpful to me. mr. rohr shared one-third of

the population is african-american. is that consistent with your numbers? i know when the census has done its counts, there is a civil rights battle to under count for low-income and african americans. how do you do your count? they use the census and other ways, but how do you adjust for maybe an under count of your numbers especially reaching non-english speaking populations like the undocumented population? >> [speaker not understood] will come up with the other questions you had. i do know one number off the top of my head. you mentioned the ethnicity issue. our survey indicated that african americans represented 24% of the homeless population in our survey. and in your profile of 6% in the general population is accurate.

relative to making adjustments for under count, the hud guidelines that are put out for the count are very prescriptive and they actually change every single -- practically every single year. certainly every two years. so, there is no ability to do any additional estimations over what you observe on your count typically unless you have a scientific sample. so, doing adjustments for various factors of under count is not really allowed in the official reporting. that said, the definition is also very, very specific in that it does eliminate significant folks that many of us would consider part of the count, but are actually excluded from the count because

of the homeless definition that hud applies for point in time count. specifically, double up persons and couch surfers are excluded from the count. they're very difficult to actually observe and officially enumerate in any kind of methodology because of privacy concerns and our inability to get into private property and homes. but the county office of education and the education districts throughout the state have a slightly broader definition which includes double ups and we know from the data that they supply that the double up number is a very significant number. sometimes, you know, 5 to 6 times the point in time number that can be reported. so, there's also specific

outreach challenges, as you said, with ethnic groups to get to, and our ability to outreach to them is dependent upon the ability of the community to have folks that can reach into those, into those communities and get a window to their living conditions. and then commonly, what we'll find in a lot of ethnic groups that they vary significantly fall into that double up category. we found that latino families and many asian families that are what are probably homeless by most common definitions. even if we knew about them, they would be excluded from the specific reporting. so, in general, we always -- we don't do any adjustments of our observed count because we're

restricted from doing so and we don't have the certainty to be able to do it. more often than not, we've felt that the definition is probably more limiting to the count number than any kind of statistical estimations. >> too much in transitional, have we seen an increase in 50 years, the love era, are there more younger people coming now or is this a common trend that's been flat? >> well, it's kind of hard to say. we certainly don't -- we don't have the quantitative data back up in san francisco because thises was the first year that we did the youth count we have as a firm been doing youth count since 2005 and have been advocates of coming up with

dedicated youth count strategies. in los angeles is where we first rolled out the dedicated youth counts and we haven't seen increases in los angeles as youth category. but until recently youth was defined as under 18. and generally unaccompanied youth under 18 is not as great as that 18 to 24 age group which is -- which is now an official reporting category. did you have numbers on vehicles? >> i don't have it with me. [speaker not understood]. >> the vehicle numbers in our observations in other communities have been increasing dramatically in places like santa clara, santa cruz in particular, monterey

where we've seen huge increases in the vehicularly housed, as we call them because historically we know that youth -- not youth. historically we know that living in your own car is one of the first places, one of the first refuges that homeless will go to if they have it. and then anecdotally, our experience has been that that is rarely sustained longer than a year because the high cost of keeping up your car, the tickets and the code enforcement issues with parking and other related issues. >> do you want to help me out here, 13% -- >> can you speak into the microphone, that would be great. >> it was 13% of those found in the point in time counted living in their cars, 13%. >> and, again, that's consistent with other communities.

whereas the san francisco overall point in time count was, 2013, was roughly flat when compared to the 2011 number. some comparative numbers in neighboring communities, santa clara went up 8%. los angeles 18%. new york city 22%. i didn't include it in my notes here. santa cruz went up 28%. and consistently, the numbers of unsheltered are even higher than san francisco's 59%. they range from, you know, 60, 67, 68% to 82% in santa cruz county, which is our home county. what we -- one of the other

questions you asked earlier was commented on is that even in this environment where there have obviously been a tremendous number of successes from various departments and programs that have been developed in the city, why isn't the number going down. and our observations, and again, the point in time count doesn't get to all the why's. it's not really the purpose of it, unfortunately. this has been a very tough economic period. and just to stay flat in this environment represents a huge accomplishment. the other thing that we've observed in some of the other communities is this whole double up population which, because it's ineligible for putting time counts, doesn't get quantified very effectively. it's also very challenging to

quantify it. what we have noticed in particular in one community that we did measure double up homeless was in santa cruz county that the number of double ups in santa cruz county in the last two years increased approximately 50 to 75%. and what we're getting from that data and from other anecdotal sources is that throughout the communities that we've worked in, the first safety net of friends and family is being severely tapped by folks that have lost their housing and are on the verge of homelessness. so, the traditional family housing safety net that has been able to absorb these

recession cycles that we're in right now is add a saturation point forcing more and more folks onto the street as that safety net is unable to support the friends and families that they've taken in, you know, during these economic hard times. so, we think that that's likely happening in san francisco as well which, of course, is further exacerbated by, you know, the housing shortage that exists here and the increasing demand for that housing. you know, you can see it in communities like los angeles where they have the 18% increase in homelessness amidst a real renaissance in their whole service sector and public-private partnerships that -- with united way and

other agencies which, you know, have not been done in years, yet even with those interventions they saw a significant increase. one of the other comments that i did want to talk a little bit about, we did note that roughly 39%, you know, came to san francisco as homeless. trent mentioned this. this is whether services locally are magnet for homeless. this is another fascinating area, homeless mobility. the numbers that we've seen in other commutes are very consistently in the 60 to 70% range that the homeless in a

measured community had lived previously in that community as part of a normal life. so, the actual mobility of services attracting the homeless is something that we haven't seen any empirical data to support. and the numbers in san francisco are very consistent with the other communities that we've worked in. >> have you seen over time as well? that is really helpful information to know. >> yeah, there's -- i think there's a miss understanding that the homeless move around almost in a market-based system where they see where services are and make a calculation that they're going to go to where those services are like a consumer. and our experience has been

those kind of movements definitely exist, but they're not dissimilar to folks that are the general population that are attracted to the city for employment opportunities, friends and family, resources that they have in looking for an opportunity with their safety net. and hoping that that safety net can turn them around. and this whole idea of residency and what really defines a resident is not very specific, but our feeling is the numbers are for the homeless residency of san francisco are not that different than the general population numbers as far as transiency goes. to sum it up, the magnet theory

is not something city services has to worry about as a big impact in attracting homeless. their ability to move around and respond even within the city is limited. we specifically did a study in las vegas in '07 where there what a feeling that in the summertime the homeless would leave las vegas because of the heat and would come back in the wintertime when the weather was better. and we did a seasonal study and determined from that that there's virtually no impact on seasonality. empirically when we did some of the surveys, we found that they had significant challenges in moving around. so, they don't have the ability

to quickly respond to things like weather. there are other kind of more normal reasons for moving around, mainly to access new opportunities that they think they may have. we also kind of compared from the survey results, we compared some of the qualitative data, specifically the subpopulation data that we saw in san francisco and compared it to other communities and it's consistent with the other communities in the bay area and in california. the chronic numbers are as a percentage fairly consistent. hud had been narrowing down the definition on chronic homelessness. as i said in their rules, definition every two years.

so, that contributes to the reduction in the number as well as the services and interventions that are taking place. >> so, the count we have, that was like 4,000, it went down to 1.9 thousand,000. [speaker not understood]? >> some of it is. i'm not going to say all of it or whatever, and i don't want to lessen the contributions that have been done by different programs, but there's absolutely definitional impacts on the numbers. and that's not just true of the chronic definition. that's true of the overall count. communities have done better job through the years of doing the counts, but there ha been a lot of clarification and technical assistance by hud provided to communities and a lot of that technical

assistance has resulted in the elimination of a lot of data sources. >> so, that doesn't change the definition. how about the information that's collected, is there a difference in how it was collected before to the last time, the last count? are we seeing the numbers now not appearing as accurate as was reported earlier in this hearing? >> so, it's just different. in 2004 there was not a survey that was administered which would be the source for the reporting. that didn't happen until -- that survey with different applications of the definition which included a more significant unsheltered outreach didn't happen until '09 when i believe we did the first survey here.

>> lookinging at the numbers for san francisco between 2009 and 2011 for chronic homelessness there is a drastic increase. that is an increase we didn't see in the count of other communities we work with even though they went through the definitional changes. using the same process, they didn't see the same outcomes, but helpful. the definitional change wasn't really drastic in san francisco. due to the way that we've been collecting data in san francisco consistently since 2009-2011-2013, the data that we've been using to kind of define the definition of chronic homelessness has been relatively consistent. so, using the sour va that is a follow-up to the census, the questions that are used were pretty much right on par as what has been used in the past, the trending is very different in san francisco compared to other communities. >> supervisor mar? >> yes, i nowakly years ago supervisor tom ammiano when he was a supervisor and s-r-o

organizations had an s-r-o census, and i'm wondering is that a part of your surveys and your counts as well? >> no, s-r-os are not included. supported inclusive housing is not included in a time count, nor is section 8 part of a point in time count ~. >> thank you for representing. it would be helpful if you don't mind whatever you are presenting on or even follow-up questions, if you wouldn't mind sending that data over, that would be helpful. you can send it to my office. i'll distribute it to my colleague on the board of supervisors. >> great, i'll get together a little abstract for you. >> thank you. colleagues, any further questions at this time? okay, thank you very much. much appreciated. at this point i know [speaker not understood], bash garcia, director of bph, thank you for your patience.

sfgov-tv, i think we have some slides for ms. garcia. >> my assistant is going to try to put this up on. i think i lost that document. good afternoon, supervisor farrell and supervisors, thank you so much for having this hearing. i started my career in homelessness and i'm still in homelessness in my career. i consider myself still the director of homelessness for the department. i started my career at [speaker not understood] and ran that clinic and went on to subsidy services in the 12th. i hope you can give you the broad [speaker not understood] particularly as the plan came out . and i was part of that whole process. so, i wanted to talk a little bit about some of the new projilts that we put online and some of the improvements. but as one of the largest departments and one of the

larger general fund departments, being the director of health for the last three years has been really important to me to really look at how we use our resources. and, so, i've done a lot of reorganizing in the department to look at efficiencies without searching for new dollars because that's a really important process for us, particularly as we go forward with affordable care act and affordable care act is demanding the health departments like ourselves with healthy living system to become more efficient in the way we deliver services and we're going to do that with us by not only looking at outcomes but also the way we're going to pay for our services. so, we know in the future we're going to have to get much more efficient. and i'll share with you a little bit of the process that we've gone through. i also want to thank trent rohr from hsa and bevan dufty from hope and my partner through this process. we work very honestly together in looking at how to improve our services. so, we talked a little about project homeless connect and daily connect is a new service added to that, knowing that

project homeless connect and, supervisor mar, you talked about how to get involved from a policy perspective, i see project homeless connect [speaker not understood]. i go to as many homeless [speaker not understood] as i can. there are 10,000 volunteers in the community, 1,000 come in [speaker not understood] in seeking services. having spoken to many of them, some who come to ever connect, they've made a real big change in their attitude and perspective of homelessness in san francisco and they also contribute to that. that was [speaker not understood] project connect. we developed daily connect as a way to look at what happens when homeless connect is not around with all these rich services we try to bring on a quarterly basis. daily connect is over every day. they use a lot of social media, they get 20 to 25 people that come daily to their office.

they look at that need of the day, they look at shoes, they look at material goods for options involving volunteers. at the end of the day they get many things individuals had requested that day. they do a great job of looking at ensuring how the people get needs met through our daily connect. they're moving daily connect to shelter connect. we'll be starting that next month and engage with some of the individuals in the shelter and kind of bring them into the daily connect. outreach and engagement, we talked a lot about the hot team. the hot team became 24 hours not by magic. what we did is literally used to take the lap band you used to see transporting people and we took that model of the 24-hour component and merged it into the hot team to bring it

to 24 hours, and looking at efficiency in the 24 model. we worked with fha because many transports were from shelter to shelter. hsa -- this is why it's important to leverage with each other's department. hsa [speaker not understood], that freed us up to use utilizers. hope from shes and those who needed us to respond to areas of need for homeless individuals -- >> quick question because we talked about this earlier. the mobile outreach versus the hot time. ~ team. >> yes. let me talk a little bit how we're looking at the mobile crisis team. many of these services, this is part of our affordable care act and health care reform. we to look at including a