On a rainy January morning three years ago, more than 100 people blanketed the 607 square miles that span Santa Cruz County, seeking to count every single unsheltered — and temporarily sheltered — individual living in our midst.
The one-day “point-in-time count” is the method the federal government uses to measure and compare the depth of individual communities’ homelessness needs. On that day, more than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, our county’s situation was among the most dire in the state.
Over the course of a five-and-a-half hour search that began at 4:30 a.m., the count tallied 2,167 people living on the edge of the margins of our community. Despite consensus among local experts that the number was an extreme undercount, it still gave Santa Cruz County the distinction of having the…
