How big is California’s homelessness crisis? Inside the huge, statewide effort to find out

Thousands of volunteers fanned out across California this week, peering down alleyways, into parked cars and along creek beds in a mass effort to count the state’s homeless population. 

The federally mandated census, done every two years and dubbed the point-in-time count, serves as the main framework Californians use to understand their state’s homelessness crisis. The data it produces influence everything from allocations of state funding, to local policy decisions, to the way politicians talk about homelessness in campaign speeches.