City Prepares For Sixth Annual Homeless Street Count

More than 2,500 Volunteers Needed for HOPE 2008

Department of Homeless Services (DHS) Commissioner Robert V. Hess today announced that the sixth annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE 2008), a survey of all individuals living on city streets, in city parks and in the subway system, will be held on the night of Monday, January 28, 2008. This is the fourth year that HOPE will be conducted citywide.  More than 2,500 volunteers are needed to canvass the city to count the number of individuals who are living unsheltered on the streets, in parks and in other public spaces.

"It’s unacceptable for so many of our fellow New Yorkers to be living on the streets," said DHS Commissioner Hess. "One way concerned citizens can help right now is by calling 311 and volunteering one night to help estimate the size of the street homeless population. But HOPE is not just about counting people or adding up numbers; HOPE is about reaching out to those men and women who most need our help."

Volunteers can sign up by calling 311 or visiting www.nyc.gov/dhs.  All volunteers will receive a special HOPE 2008 T-shirt. Volunteers will meet at 10:30 p.m. on Monday, January 28, 2008 at training sites located throughout the five boroughs. After a brief orientation and training, teams will disperse to count homeless individuals in assigned geographic areas from midnight until 4 a.m. Last year volunteers walked a total of 8,291 miles and surveyed more than 1,000 subway cars.

HOPE 2008 will employ the same methodology used in previous counts. The City’s methodology for estimating the size of the street homeless population has been acknowledged by the federal Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) as the "HUD standard" for statistically valid methodologies. Volunteer teams will canvass all areas identified to likely have street homeless individuals. In addition, a random sample of those areas not identified as likely to have street homeless individuals also will be canvassed.

In addition, "decoys," or trained individuals posing as homeless individuals, will be planted as a quality assurance measure. This shadow count helps to gauge the accuracy of the total estimate and allows us to adjust our final count estimate accordingly. This will be the fourth year HOPE has included a shadow count.

HOPE 2008 is part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s five-year action plan to end chronic homelessness, "Uniting for Solutions Beyond Shelter." HOPE is critical to helping evaluate the effectiveness of current strategies to overcome street homelessness as well as developing appropriate housing resources for the most vulnerable New Yorkers currently living without shelter.

Based on the previous five years of HOPE, DHS continually strives to improve outreach services to those living on the streets. This particularly has been the case since the HOPE 2007 count as DHS, in partnership with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, reconfigured outreach services to better position the City to achieve its goal to reduce street chronic homelessness by two-thirds. New street outreach teams target chronically homeless individuals for intensive outreach and placement into permanent housing, and use resources including safe havens, stabilization beds and supportive housing, which allow for rapid placement of clients indoors. The teams also are connected with cutting edge tools, using wireless handheld devices to create the City’s first registry of street homeless individuals. In addition the Safe Haven program, launched in 2006, targets the chronically homeless, and DHS plans to add an additional 500 Safe Haven beds by the end of 2008. Another new component is a partnership with the MTA to coordinate services and housing placements for unsheltered individuals in the subway system.

The HOPE 2007 count found unsheltered homelessness had decreased 15% from 2005, the first year DHS conducted HOPE in all five boroughs. Homeless individuals living unsheltered continued to decline or remained steady after steep declines in four out of five boroughs, and 19% fewer individuals were living on city streets or in parks since 2006.